Just Bust a Move – Love Is Awkward

“Just Bust a Move” gathers a small audience on the Creekside Boardwalk underneath the Sandbar Restaurant. We watch as a young man takes a break from the club upstairs to agonize about how to impress a girl he likes with epic dance moves. The set is perfect, I was right along with him, remembering being outside clubs taking a break from the intensity of the social situation inside.

He opens the play with an invitation to teach him how to dance – an invitation I didn’t get the sense he actually wanted to be taken up on. I wanted to like this play more than I did. It is overwrought with the cheap humor of youth, using race, gender, sexual orientation, psychology, sexual practice, and stereotypes in a way that was just enough to lightly twig my political sensibilities and not clever enough to make me laugh; although others did.

The most engaging thing about “Just Bust a Move” is the cast size. I was regularly surprised to find yet another character was being added to this mix of people aiming to help this young man agonize about getting the girl. Yet, none of these additional characters did anything to add to the nuance of the plot. “Just Bust a Move” is eager and short, but is awkward in all the wrong ways.