'Pageant Play' is a riotous parody with dark shadows

"Glen Anderson's set simply, yet attractively provides all the essentials – including multiple exits for the pop-in/pop-out action of classic farce. Felia Davenport's costumes are exactly right."

To parody the child-beauty-pageant industry is such a cheap shot. It's far too easy to mock those stage mothers who push and push their little girls into that fantasy princess world of glitz and tulle and tiaras and precocious sexuality. It's been done and done and done. But "Pageant Play" is different. It's more. This play is so over-the-top that we are swept away in its sheer excess. And this production by the UMSL Theatre Department at the Kranzberg is blessed with such lightning pace and such relentless, explosive energy that we simply can't look down on all those cheap laughs; we succumb, flattened by the beautifully detailed, outrageous mockery.