There is nothing quite like sex. There is nothing quite like music. There is nothing quite like good drugs. 

And there is absolutely nothing like sex, music and good drugs, especially when rolled into the living room of a Manhattan apartment filled with the dissolute, the lonely, the boring, the bored and the hungry.

Welcome to "The Wild Party," the Andrew Lippa musical that opened for All In Productions Friday night at Next Act Theatre.

The 16-year-old play is about Queenie (Peyton Oseth), a vaudeville hottie, her lover Burr (Mitch Weindorf), a vaudeville clown, and the tempestuous affair they have, one that moves from red hot to icy cold to downright nasty.

The wild party of the title is an affair Queenie throws designed to gather all the sinners she knows, and some she doesn’t, in order to humiliate Burr.

The promise of the excitement of all this sin in one room never happens in this production, though, despite my blatant hopes that we be swept up in this miasma of despair and desperation.

The problems with this production are many.

First of all, if you are going to stage a play about sex and love affairs and sin, you need to have some steam. This show had no steam.

We saw lots of boys and girls in their underwear. We saw some brief moments of simulated coupling between boys and girls, boys and boys and girls and girls and girls. But we didn’t see any heat. Nobody on this stage had any depth of emotional gravitas or showed any serious kind of growth from the start to the end of the play. It was just too much of the same note. We’re hot! We’re sexy! We’re dirty! We’re horny! We have no boundaries!

That was the message, told to us over and over. But we never really got to see any of it or feel any of it. Some wise man once said, "Show, don't tell."

The problem here was that the whole thing seemed too much like seventh graders in someone’s basement dressing up and pretending to be dirty grownups. There was no maturity to any of these characters, and I think it was the fault of the cast, not the play itself.

At times, I thought that people seemed self-conscious about this whole thing. They needed to find a way to throw it on the table and let us all get a look at something inside of them.

Liz Norton, one of my favorite actors, played Madeline True, a lesbian invited to the party who's on the prowl for some young and tender thing to play with. Norton steals the show with her plea for an "Old Fashioned Love Story."

"I need a good-natured, old fashioned lesbian love story
The kind of tale my mama used to tell
Where the girls were so sweet
And the music would swell
And in the end the queen
Would send the men off to hell."

Norton dripped a predatory sexuality that was missing everywhere else in this production. Her number was the high point of the night.

Queenie and Burr were joined in the odd couple department by Kate (Amber Smith), a lady of the evening who goes where the winds of lust blow her, and Black (Ernest Bellafonte), a decent man caught up in this whole thing that’s beyond his field of dreams.

Smith has by far the most expressive voice of this cast, and her Kate was a self-proclaimed slut of the first class. But there seemed to be almost no reason for anyone else to fall in love with or lust after anyone else.

They nibbled around the edges of loneliness and regret, but nobody ever grabbed anything by the teeth and shook the tree of emotion. It was almost as if everybody was afraid to be too much of anything. This is not a subtle play, and subtleties just drive it to a place where it’s not all that much fun to watch it anymore.

An axe also needed to be taken to some of the numbers. Having two minor characters sing about their love in "Two of a Kind" was neither funny nor meaningful. At the end, the pleasant orchestra, led by Allison Bekolay, had a number where a minor character danced. Again, what did it mean, and why did we have to watch it?

All-In is a relatively young company and I’ve loved everything they’ve done so far. That only deepens my disappointment at this outing.

"The Wild Party" runs through Sept. 17 and information on showtimes and tickets is available here.

Production Credits: Director, Robby McGhee; Assistant Director, Jared Stepp; Music Director, Allison Bekolay; choreographer, Stephanie Stazak; Fight Director, Tawnie Thompson; Stage Manager, Alex Scheurell; Set Designer, Burt Gross, Costume Designer, Christy Siebers; Lighting Designer, Mike Van Dreser; Sound Designer, Deidre Buckles’ Property Master, Katie Young.