Men Are Pigs in All In Productions’ ‘Dogfight’


The three singing Marines at the heart of Dogfight are so eager for battlefield glory that the thought they might not make it back from Vietnam barely even crosses their minds. Nor, for that matter, does the possibility that they may be awful people. Already heroes in their own minds, they celebrate their last night before shipping out by staging a dogfight, a competition where each attempts to land the ugliest date.

The Marines order respect from any civilian unfortunate enough to cross their path; they never consider that the women they deceive might deserve the same. Audience members with even a passing familiarity with any ’90s movie where a guy courts a kind-hearted girl under cruel false pretenses then must grovel his way back to her good graces will have a sense of where this story is going even before an idealistic waitress, Rose (played with convincing vulnerability by Rachael Zientek), is introduced as a target for boyish Marine Eddie Birdlace (Lucas Pastrana).

If the setup sounds a bit like She’s All That with prancing Marines, that’s not all that far off, especially in the musical’s pithy opening act, which invites the audience to laugh at the Marines’ boorish antics before the inevitable fallout. 


Closing its inaugural season with the Wisconsin premiere of the show, All In Productions does its best to work around a punches-pulling script that denounces its characters’ behavior yet stops short of denouncing the characters themselves. Along with a house band that plays the score as tasteful chamber pop, the production is aided by a wonderful cast of actresses who flesh out women who otherwise might’ve been reduced to simple punchiness. The best of them is a scene-stealing Amber Smith as Marcy, a tough-talking prostitute and dogfight contender who holds her own against Bernstein (J.T. Backes), the most brutish of the Marine trio. She’s uncouth, outspoken and short a few front teeth, yet Smith imbues her with unlikely dignity. 


 Through Sept. 19 at Next Act Theatre, 255 S. Water St. For tickets, call 414-278-0765 or visit nextact.org.