The name and plug say it all: Scream Queens: The Musical - “They sing, they dance, they die!” There’s little else here beyond the worship of the peculiar talents of the female victims of low budget slasher films and their shared physical proportions. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. If you’re a fan or either, or both, or if you like watching good actresses act like bad actresses, then you’re in for a treat. There’s enough lamenting and jiggling and haphazard singing and dancing here to fill the cozy Soul Invictus space for 90+ minutes. Scott Martin has loaded the stage with six stereotypical B-movie actresses telling us of the six very different upbringings that have led them to what we are told is a horror convention in Ohio. In having his busty gals underhandedly audition for the director of the next big slasher pic who is said to be in the audience, Martin gets to reference every recognizable and obscure reference from Ed “One-Shot” Wood to the oft-forgotten horror beginnings of some pretty big careers. He also gets to use every joke about large breasts that he can cram into the evening.

What @rtists Theatre Project and director Doug Loynd are offering is the perfect antidote to pretension. Loynd stages the play at an amphetamine pace, but there is a pitfall to all of this stumbling and shrieking: at times the evening can become a little shrill and repetitious. The joy comes not in accuracy in performance or empathy with the characters, but in getting the references and beholding the cleavage.

The six ladies of various ages, from the fresh-faced Kansan Tonya (Kim Jeffries) to the battle-scarred Brit Nadine (Andi Watson), offer songs about their backgrounds and their experiences in the underbelly of Hollywood. They’re crammed with several good jokes and a few misfires, while Ryan Tang’s choreography is full of burlesque-style tributes to musical theatre that maximize the jiggle.

The difficulty of putting on a show of this type is asking those who can to act like those who can’t. The strongest singers (both in tone and in loudness) are Nicole Lang as jaded and loveless Richelle and Johanna Carlisle as the incorrigible Alexis. A few are obviously skilled dancers, though Tracy Payne is not one of them. This is where that whole tricky “doing a good job of doing bad” comes in. While Payne is very funny during her second big number, her first is awkward because those behind her obviously can dance and are limiting their talents for balance. It results in many inconsistencies then and throughout the other dance numbers. Can we? Can’t we? It all depends on whether they’ve remembered to forget.

Undercut by her more limited character is B. Nicole Park, playing the crossover horror and adult star Dee Dee. The connections are obvious, but the jokes are stale compared to some of the others, such as the ongoing film clips that are so deliciously cheap they capture that je ne sais pas of on-the-fly filmmaking. The biggest problem is having a lot to do a little. Jeffries’ character is one-note, a note that she plays to the fullest, while Watson’s Nadine starts off tippling and grows only by the size of her bottles.