Trailer trash, and proud of it

If you have spandex, prepare to wear it now. You'll look fab in your seat at Montgomery Theater in Souderton, where

The Great American Trailer Park Musical

- a little show with a big wallop, like a bin full of hissing trailer propane tanks - sprawls gleefully across the stage.

It's an all-American hoot, as kitsch as a teased 'do on an '80s soap-opera heroine. And it brazenly dismisses social convention - in this trailer park's community garden, not a single stereotype goes untended.

The show is a coproduction by Montgomery Theater and Center City's 11th Hour Theatre Company, which will bring Trailer Park downtown to the Arden Theatre in June. I can firmly say I'll be in line to see this frolic, masterfully staged by 11th Hour resident director Megan Nicole O'Brien, choreographed for maximum punch by Jenn Rose, and costumed with a healthy regard for reckless extremism by Lauren Perigard.

The show's pull, and the production's sizzle, come from the combination of normally opposing forces: silly and smart, trash and class - a mix cited by one of its cast members in her program bio thanking "the classiest trashy cast around."

Trailer Park, by Betsy Kelso, is at root a conventional love story about a marriage gone sour and the appearance of Another Woman who's likely to hasten its demise. Set in a Florida trailer park, it involves a toll-taker (Paul McElwee) whose wife (Nancie Sanderson) has been holed up inside their mobile home for 20 years, ever since their baby was kidnapped. The Other Woman is a pole-dancing stripper (Carly Brooke Pearlstein) who bops into town and occupies the neighboring trailer, where she's hiding from her violent, glue-sniffing boyfriend (Michael Doherty).

The entire story is moved along by a Greek chorus of three busty, in-your-face women - the park's saucy owner (Leah Walton), a sassy resident whose husband is on death row (Marissa Hines), and another who is happily clueless and pregnant (Rachel Camp).

Trailer Park lacerates America's downside life and mocks everything, including itself, with equal vigor. Through David Nehls' score, it uses and abuses country music as a natural outgrowth of trailer-park life. The cast sings about roadkill, about a marriage that's been flushed down the pipes and "is now in the hands of the Ty-D-Bol man," about love and panic (which may be interchangeable).

Their crystalline voices never waver as they prance around Maura Roche's trailer-facade set, backed by unseen musical director Dan Kazemi and three other musicians. And, in possibly the biggest trick of all, they make spandex look great.