Arthur Laurents may have a lot to answer for with the book for this 1964 Stephen Sondheim musical, which is early enough to fall into an Absurdist category.  It is a zany musical about how people who are individual are side-lined and ostracised for their otherness and persecuted by the authorities. 

This the first full length production since 1964 when the premiere was met with multiple problems including a dancer falling into the pit and landing on top of a saxophone player who then suffered a heart attack.  A concert version played at Carnegie Hall in 1995. In 2003 a revised version played in Los Angeles with permission for the revision from Sondheim and Laurents. 

The plot is of a town with a corrupt mayor where the town is failing to attract enough visitors.  Mayor Cora Hoover Hooper (Alex Young) and her three male sidekicks come up with a scheme to launch a miracle by water appearing from a large rock.  The miracle sees multi-coloured confetti sprayed from the rock and launches the energy water dance from the whole cast.

Alex Young says “everybody hates me” as she steals a lollipop from a child.  She is supported by Comptroller Schub (Danny Lane), Treasurer Cooley (Samuel Clifford) and Chief of Police Magruder (Renan Teodoro) in comic song and dance.

The problem comes when Nurse Fay Apple (Chrystine Symone) disguises herself as a French investigator from Lourdes to ascertain whether this is a genuine miracle.  The town is called upon to demonstrate the miraculous properties of the rock by “curing” 49 patients from the local loony bin, sorry, mental health care facility, attractively called here, The Cookie Jar.  The doctor in charge of The Cookie Jar is Dr Detmold (a quirky and delicious Nathan Taylor, happy with any pronoun!) who is pretty much indistinguishable from his patients, the cookies from the “sanitorium for the socially pressured.”