The point of the evening is entirely summed up when the lights first come up on the cast of Gilligan’s Island: the Musical, and audience lets out a delighted laugh of recognition. This is a nostalgia show. Actually once we’ve seen the characters, there’s not much left to do but wallow in the naïve comedy in the style of 1960s sitcoms.

Gilligan’s Island: the Musical is intentionally awful. The musical recreates the characteristic elements of the original show, including the infectiously catchy theme song with its litany of the characters and its annoying mispronunciation of “Robinson Crusoe.” The talented O’Connell & Company cast approximates the tone and substance of the original quite accurately as well: Joseph Demerly as Gilligan; Tom Doyle as the Skipper too; Michael Tosha and Mary Moebius as the Millionaire and his Wife; Stephanie Bax as the Movie Star; Guy Tomassi and Susana Breese as the Professor and Mary Ann (or as “the rest,” depending upon which season we’re talking about). And that’s all you need to know.

The score runs the gamut from forgettable to ridiculously grandiose, and mimics other shows—for the ballad “I Should Have Said,” think “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Mis, and so forth. The comedy would be more pointed with a full orchestration and with stronger voices, but the deliberate quality of amateurism employed here works well enough.

Comedy challenges the critic by obscuring any socially redeeming reason for its existence. With Gilligan’s Island: the Musical, or with any pure nostalgia piece, we are confronted with our own aging and the realization that we are not the same people now that we were when the object of our nostalgia was first produced. Typically, nostalgia pieces suggest that the world is less innocent or somehow less wonderful now than it used to be. What has actually changed is that as we get older, we ourselves are less innocent than we used to be. Gilligan’s Island: the Musical, for instance, focuses on a flimsy plot in which aliens from another planet prepare to destroy the earth because human beings have made the world a dangerous place and do not have the capacity to get along. The idea that the world we live in today is not as innocent as the world of 1964 is undercut by the fact that a world that had already seen Hitler, Hiroshima, Joseph McCarthy, and the Kennedy Assassination was not very innocent to begin with. The Civil Rights Movement that was raging in 1964 may have been far removed from the lives of the seven castaways, but not from those of television viewers.

And so, in Gilligan’s Island: the Musical, we sit right back and we hear an escapist tale, just as some of us did 40 years ago. It is a harmless diversion.

Artie Award winner Pamela Rose Mangus makes a hilariously bad career choice in taking the part of the Alien (she may never work again). Todd Warfield has directed with appropriate energy and a pace that seems to say, “Let’s not prolong this!” Liz Houlihan’s set is especially handsome.

Let’s let it go at that, shall we?