‘PLANET’S’ SILLINESS REACHES NEW LOWS

It’s billed as “Shakespeare’s forgotten rock ‘n’ roll masterpiece.” Yet, Return to the Forbidden Planet is the novelty hit of this West End season.

The golden-oldies score pays homage to James Brown, Elvis Presley, Otis Reading, Roy Orbison, the Beach Boys, Animals, Byrds, Zombies and Moody Blues, among others. Incredibly, this low-budget musical pastiche is the upset winner over Miss Saigon for best musical in the 1990 Laurence Olivier Awards, Great Britain’s equivalent to Broadway’s Tonys.

Return doesn’t deserve that high honor — far from it — but it’s a lot of lowbrow fun. So fasten your seat belts, put on your soap-bubble space helmets and get ready to “shake, rattle and roll.”

Bob Carlton’s zany spoof of the 1956 film takes you on an inspired nostalgia trip back to the future. It’s out of this brave new world.

The style is retro-rocket chic. The mood is giddy, the special effects dazzlingly cheap. 2001? Forget it. This is the future filtered through the hilariously naive 1950s.

The fun begins as soon as you enter the Cambridge Theatre. Cast members, dressed in form-fitting green-nylon and metal-mesh space suits, usher you to your seat and urge you to strap in for an intergalactic joy ride to the planet D’llyria.

Recalcitrant audience members are coaxed individually — to their veddy, veddy British embarrassment — to make sure they know how to “reverse polarity” to survive faster-than-light-speed travel. (The required arm-waving a lot like Devo doing the hokeypokey.)

What follows liftoff (to the the beat of Surfari’s “Wipe Out”) is an affectionate takeoff that makes high-tech doggerel and mangled Shakespearean prose. (“But soft, what light through yonder airlock breaks?”) Perhaps the best pun (or worst, depending on your perspective) twists the movie’s mock Freudian moral: “Beware the ids that march.”

With its soaring grid-work parabolas, silver-studded tail fins and flashing colored bulbs, the nifty B-movie set is a teenage rock ’n’ roller’s fantasy. The starship’s control deck and instrument panels double as musical instruments for the protean 13 member cast. They play guitar, drums, organ and tambourine with interchangeable enthusiasm. They sing, dance and jerk back and forth like an old Star Trek rerun every time the ship passes through turbulence. When asteroids collide, they break into Jerry Lee Lewis’ rousingly appropriate “Great Balls of Fire.”

At the first sight of Ariel (Kraig Thornber), an “android-gynous” update of Robby the Robot, the crew launches into Connie Francis’ “Robot Man”. It’s only logical. (Part of the fun is you can detect the song cues from at least a light-year away.)

In fact, the cast does everything but act. They hardly need to, playing such parodic personalities as Ensign Penny Scyllen (the ship’s medic), Petty Officer Frank Z. Rocks (in charge of cloning) and mysterious Dr. Prospero, a lurid blend of Walter Pidgeon, Boris Karloff and Fu Manchu.

Return celebrates 20th-century pop culture on the same unpretentious level as the Bard’s work itself. That shouldn’t seem strange, since Shakespeare was as popular as anyone in his day.

In any case, this Forbidden Planet is no less legitimate than the first, a deft variation on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. If and when Return reaches New York, it should approach the longevity of Nunsense and Vampire Lesbians of Sodom as off-Broadway cult favorites. Although not much more than Beehive dressed up in extraterrestrial drag, this genial concept musical review — which already has spawned a fan club (Polarity Reversed, 43 Heathfield Rd., Hitchin, Hertfordshire, England SG5 1TA) — has its youngish crowd dancing in the aisles.

But let’s get one fact straight: Shakespeare didn’t really write this trashy science fiction treat. My theory is, Francis Bacon did.