Showing at the Bryant-Lake Bowl is “Weird Romance,” a musical by David Spencer, Alan Menken, and Alan Brennert (authors of “Little Shop of Horrors”). “Weird Romance” is billed as “two one-act musicals of speculative fiction,” each running about 50 minutes with a short intermission.

The first play, “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” was the better of the two. The audience is shown a future where advertising has been outlawed, but not even this drastic measure can stop big business from plugging its products. Instead of showing products in commercials, the products appear right in the television shows.

The standout players in this piece are Dr. Isham (Paul Reyburn) and P. Burke (Susan Nickel). Isham is a slick, scary CEO pushing all the buttons, while Burke is a sweet, handicapped bag lady with a heart of gold. They meet when she’s mugged and wakes up not in a hospital but a laboratory, where she’s offered the chance to start her life over. He’s creating a star, and she’s the monster to his Frankenstein.

The second play, “Her Pilgrim Soul,” features Dr. Drayton (Alan Sorenson), a man who makes life-ike holograms, and Nola (Suzanne Reyburn), a hologram with a mind of her own.

The one-act plays flow quickly, leaving no time for long, sappy speeches and requiring the musical numbers to be essential to the plot. As a whole, the cast was well suited to the roles they played. The strongest player was Susan Nickel, who stood out in the first piece with a sympathetic role and a strong voice. Early on, Burke sings, “Stop and See Me,” the first really good song of the show, when she shows her human side.

In the second piece, Nickel appears in a relatively minor role, but her hilarious duet, “A Man,” was a definite highlight of the show, as she and her best friend ponder the saying, ‘Men-can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em.’

Both “Girl” and “Pilgrim” deal with alienation and loneliness, but manage to be uplifting. Being able to identify with Burke and her wish to be seen as a person and Dr. Drayton’s feelings of general dissatisfaction with his life made the stories real. The music was so well integrated into the story that I half expected people on the street to burst into song.