Our LA Times review - pretty good - no real obvious pull quotes, unless one of you can figure out what they are:
Science doesn't get much more fictionalized than in the silly sci-fi musical "The Brain From Planet X."
A mutation of such movies as "The Brain From Planet Arous" and "Plan Nine From Outer Space," the show spins a comic tale of space aliens who choose the 1950s San Fernando Valley as the launching point for their takeover of Earth. Introduced at Los Angeles City College in 2006, the show returns, with some interim tweaking, at the Chance Theater, as an early event in the two-month Festival of New American Musicals.
Much of the fun of David Wechter and Bruce Kimmel's show, as staged by Kimmel, is its low-tech re-creation of low-tech B movies. Some gags are slap-on-the-forehead obvious, such as the alien spacecraft constructed of taped-together pie tins hanging from a stick. Others are guffaw-inducingly unexpected.
Man-of-many-faces Michael Irish provides Rod Serling-like setup; Mark Rothman, outfitted with a bouffant-size brain, is a Mel Brooks of a space villain who's saddled with squabbling henchmen Emily Clark (in intergalactic glamazon mode) and Daniel Berlin (how does he sustain that helium voice?). Allison Appleby and Bob Simpson, as unsuspecting Valley householders, imitate such TV moms and pops as the Stones and the Andersons. The cast of 15 is supported by a keyboard-percussion-reeds trio.
The music and lyrics, mostly by Kimmel, are pastiches, at their cleverest when they nod toward shows you'd little suspect ("42nd Street"? "Company," for goodness sake?). Overall, there's so much copying going on that audiences can make a virtual trivia game out of identifying the sources.
One could call the show derivative, meaning it as a put-down, but "The Brain" would just take it as a compliment.