Erika Olson and cast in"Run Bambi Run" at Milwaukee Repertory Theater.
Most of the audience at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater Thursday night knew exactly who “Bambi” Bembenek was, a former cop, a sometime bunny at the old Playboy resort in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and an escapee from Wisconsin’s Taycheedah Correctional Institution, whereafter she spent the rest of her very tough life either on the lam or trying to clear her name.
The guitarists and the horn players enact Bambi’s early life: her struggles at the sexist police academy, her lucky choice in loving parents but her bad choice in partners, both professional and personal and her bouncing around from cop to waitress to security guard. That’s the first moment when the otherwise tight show stutters: It’s caught between wanting to keep the audience in the dark as the mystery unfolds slowly and wanting to roar with feminist musical indignation about what happened to the surely innocent Bambi It wants the calls of “Free Bambi,” a la “Free Britney,” but also the Brechtian remove. The result is that the crime at the center of the story is too muddily staged and its circumstances rushed. That needs a fix.