The image is instantly familiar: Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears crammed into a car, caught in a paparazzi flash, on the cover of The New York Post. That iconic photograph, from 2006, and the inside article’s headline — “3 Bimbos of the Apocalypse” — conjures a time when Calvin Klein boxers peeked out from low-rise jeans, pop star aspirants pinned their hopes on MTV’s “Total Request Live,” and a juicy tabloid meltdown could end a career.
In “The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse,” a deliciously fizzy new musical from Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley that opened Tuesday at the Pershing Square Signature Center, something is different in this version of the photo. The painted tableau of the three bimbos that looms briefly onstage contains a previously unnoticed detail: a slim wrist, at the edge of the frame, dangling a charm bracelet that spells out “Coco.”
Now, in 2025, a Zillennial internet sleuth who goes by Brainworm (Milly Shapiro) fills us in: Coco was a one-hit wannabe who had uploaded her own music videos to YouTube in the hopes of going viral, or at least bacterial, before she disappeared. We see the red-maned Coco (Keri René Fuller) appear onstage in a midriff-exposing top, belting out a murderously upbeat tune. “I don’t think therefore I am!” she sings before needling her listeners: “the less you try / the more they cry out for ur bag of tricks / (they’re dumb as bricks).” The song is catchy as hell, and plays like an underdog bid for MTV immortality.
Brainworm enlists the help of two other “worms” — teenage shut-ins who also spend their waking lives online — to track down Coco: Earworm (Luke Islam), who sports cat ears and decodes pop culture and fashion, and Bookworm (Patrick Nathan Falk), who sifts through media and politics from his Nebraska bedroom. Like Brainworm, who identifies as an “intersectional feminist” and specializes in tracking down missing girls, they are descendants of PerezHilton.com and Tumblr true-crime threads.
Soon, they fall into a clickhole of clues. An obituary for Coco surfaces, which mentions that she “went on a bender and spiraled out of control.” Grainy flip-phone photos are studied. Is that a knife jammed into a clothing rack? Could it have been used as a murder weapon? And what to make of the “Coco” charm bracelet Brainworm received from an anonymous sender? Is it a hoax?
In their search, the worms leave no monogrammed outfit unturned. (Cole McCarty’s costumes revisit the era’s rhinestone-studded jeans, velour tracksuits and garish, faux-glam accessories.) And lyrics to Coco’s song are obsessively analyzed. The best of the musical’s tunes, which includes Coco’s ecce bimbo opener as well as more speculative numbers sung by the worms in places like Walmart, have the tingle of soda pop reaching a tender spot at the back of your throat. (The music director Dan Schlosberg leads a small but mighty band upstage.)
While it has become a trope for shows to display projections of group chats or online comments (often with redundant voice-over), “Bimbo” refreshingly steers clear of such contrivances. Under Rory Pelsue’s fluid direction, we hear online comments voice-bombing Brainworm’s internal monologue. They range from fetishistic (“show me your toes”) to hostile (“my day sucked and you made it worse”), and are alternately read aloud by Brainworm and menacingly embodied by the other worms. Unsurprisingly, the more vicious the comments, the greater the number of viewers on the worms’ TikTok channels.
Breslin and Foley, whose previous work includes “Circle Jerk” — a fantasia about the creation of an indomitable influencer — bring a similar fascination with the desires and insecurities of the extremely online to “Bimbo.” But their new musical also ventures beyond cybernated spheres into a world largely devoid of technology. In this analog world, we meet Coco’s mother (Sara Gettelfinger) and sister (Natalie Walker), who reveal a very different side of Coco.
To say more would spoil the plot-twisty show, which wastes not a second of its 90 minutes. (Some of those soap-operatic turns recall Michael R. Jackson’s equally ambitious, though less disciplined “White Girl in Danger.”) Especially in its latter half, “Bimbo” traverses the gap between the very online and the very not online with exuberant intelligence. Earworm and Bookworm have a lovely number about who they are in their private realities, when no one’s looking at them. For a show about pop stardom and fandom, it has a surprising amount to say about oblivion — and our inalienable right to it.
The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse
Through June 1 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; thenewgroup.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
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