‘Hollywood Hills’ Scathingly Silly

The hills are alive with the sound of stupidity, and no musical mirrors that better than “The Hollywood Hills” in West Hollywood. Producer-lyricist David Bruskin is obviously an insider to the industry, and casts a satirist’s eye on its pretensions. His inspired pen mates original lyrics to familiar pop tunes, giddily delivered by a quintet of comic singers in a cabaret setting.

Like the business it parodies, “The Hollywood Hills” is frequently silly. Unlike the biz, it’s never pompous. But beneath the silliness lurks a caustic rage at the dream factory’s destructive fall-out.

A nun playing an accordion (a hilarious Celeste Russi) to the tune of “Edelweiss” from “The Sound of Music” praises Heidi Fleiss. In his signature squeak, Mickey Mouse (a brilliant Greg Bechtel) laments the corruption of Disney’s vision with “The Buying Game.”

Madonna, executive Joe Roth, agents--no one in the biz escapes. Even gifted artists get cut by Bruskin’s scalpel. Pop star Sting (Bechtel, brilliant again) is transformed into a plastic surgeon: “Every breast you fake/every lip you make/every rib you take. . . .”

The tiny cabaret space limits the choreography, but the company often exceeds “Saturday Night Live’s” sketches (Mark S. Larson’s loathsome Tom Arnold, for instance). Although this revue pitches “inside baseball” puns for those who can’t begin their day without reading the trades, “The Hollywood Hills” deserves to become a West Coast version of Manhattan’s “Forbidden Broadway.”

* “The Hollywood Hills,” the Hollywood Hills Cabaret, 665 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood. Mondays, 8:30 p.m. $10. (213) 466-1767. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.