The Parliament House restages Michael Wanzie’s musical disaster in a 20^{th-anniversary salute.}

       Throngs of excited tourists, en route to the world’s most iconic theme park, have their trip interrupted by a mysterious malfunction that causes their futuristic "highway in the sky" method of transport to catch aflame.

       What better source material could there be for a musical theater production?

        First staged in August 1986, Monorail Inferno is a singing/dancing extravaganza that lampoons popular disaster movies of the 1970s. While aboard a Walt Disney World monorail that has broken down mid-transit, one car’s surviving dozen passengers take stock in their own lives—and each other’s. Though it takes place on one of the resort’s more sedate rides, the show is an emotional rollercoaster, inducing laughter, tears, and self-reflection in its audiences.

        In the real world, back in June 1985, one of the Disney’s futuristic trains did catch fire with 200 passengers aboard. The fire was contained to the rear car of the monorail, and flames reportedly shot as high as 60 feet above the track. Passengers avoided major injury by breaking out the car’s windows and escaping to safety. Rescue teams later lowered the passengers to the ground.

       As dramatic as the actual incident was, the fictionalized show features far less drama—but is no less engaging.

       Monorail Inferno was composer Rich Charron and playwright/lyricist Michael Wanzie’s first entirely original collaboration. The two had worked together writing several songs for 1985’s Forbidden Kingdom, but that show also featured Broadway tunes by other writers. The show’s success encouraged the two to write a complete musical.

       But rather than write a show and cast performers who would best fit the roles, the duo took a different approach. At the time, both Charron and Wanzie were active in the local theater scene, typically producing shows as fundraisers with volunteer performers. As a way of saying thanks, the pair set out to write a profitable show that would star the friends who had previously worked for them on a volunteer basis.

       "That’s the reason it’s a very odd musical, in that you sometimes have minor characters singing songs and major characters who don’t sing at all," says Wanzie. "At the time we had a group of people we were writing for, and we wrote each part for their specific talents. It just happened that this monorail blew up while we were trying to think of what to write."

        "Some people believe that Wanzie actually did that so he could have a basis for the show," jokes Kenny Howard, director of the current production, performed Saturday nights at the Parliament House’s Footlight Theatre.

        It is, by all standards, a massive production to mount. Each night the curtain rises, there are 15 performers on stage, supported by a crew of seven backstage.

        "With everyone’s schedules, it’s difficult to have rehearsals, let alone mount the show," says Wanzie. "It’s also part of the reason we’ve incorporated alternates into some of the roles."

         "That’s the best part about the show," opines Howard. "You can come back and see very different characters."

       Walt’s entertainment empire lends itself to satire in several Charron/Wanzie productions. Both men are actually Disney enthusiasts who once worked as WDW cast members. Wanzie says his childhood dream was to work for Disney’s first theme park in California; the desire was far easier to fulfill when Walt Disney World was built closer to home in Florida.

         Still, the company remains ripe for ribbing.

         "No matter where you are in the world, you know of Disney," says David Dorman, the show’s musical director. "It’s a shared experience that everyone can relate to."

         "When you as a person or an entity set yourself up to be the pinnacle of something, then you’re an easy thing to lampoon," explains Wanzie. "But I don’t think we take the easiest route, focusing on a real disaster."

         "Because they take having fun so seriously, it makes it an easy target," says Howard.

         "The show is not an attack against Disney," adds Dorman. "In fact, Michael [Wanzie] loves Disney very much. It’s far more of an homage. What do they say? Imitation is the highest form of flattery."

       Wanzie credits part of the 20th-anniversary production to Parliament House general manager Bill Lape, who has long imagined a restaging of Monorail at the gay resort. He encouraged Parliament House owners Don Granatstein and Susan Unger to not only agree to pay for an upfront staging cost of several thousand dollars, but also to have the resort’s staff build sets and provide additional support—such as a spotlight operator—at their expense.

       Actor Tommy Wooten has been a longtime fan of the show, having seen the production eight times during a 1992 run. He viewed himself a perfect fit for the show, and now he portrays Tim, the little-boy-lost who’s now grown up and pissed off.

        Though Monorail Inferno may be many people’s favorite Wanzie production, it’s not necessarily his.

        "One of the reasons Rich and I agreed to do it again was that everyone seems to remember it as being so good and so wonderful, which I don’t think it ever was," admits Wanzie. "Now that we’ve honed our skills better and aligned ourselves with a wonderful director and have wonderful talent available, we have an opportunity to take something old and make it fresh and do it the way it probably should have been done in the first place."

        Charron now uses modern technology to incorporate orchestration throughout the show; the original run found the musician playing live piano accompaniment at each production.

       "What I don’t like about the show is that the songs don’t advance the plot," confesses Wanzie. A theatrical device Wanzie said he neglected to employ in his early shows is having musical numbers to advance the storyline—but that element is certainly present in his more recent work.

       What also sets Monorail apart from other recent Wanzie productions is a lack of improv, something all involved say would be nearly impossible to include considering that at various points in the show, more than a dozen cast members are on stage.

        Charron finds one other difference rather significant.

        "There’s no bar on the monorail," he says, referring to Wanzie’s booze-soaked productions such as The Ladies of Eola Heights trilogy.

        But having Monorail staged in a bar still makes imbibing easy for both cast and audience. All together, it helps to make Saturday nights at the Parliament House an E-ticket ride unlike any at Walt Disney World.

See+hear

WHAT: Monorail Inferno 2007

WHERE: The Footlight Theatre at the Parliament House Resort

WHEN: 7:15 p.m., Saturday nights, for an open-ended run

HOW: Tickets are $20 and available by calling 407-540-0317 or at Wanzie.com