As the scion of the 14th wealthiest family in America, Eliot Rosewater (David Surkin) gives out checks to opera companies, scholars, and poets. But the only poem Eliot ever liked was written on a bathroom stall in Indiana, and his favorite books are the sci-fi fantasias of a weirdo recluse named Kilgore Trout. He drinks. He’s drawn to firehouses and radical generosity. Remember Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, in which one drunk renounces wealth to give respect to the disenfranchised? It turns out that the 1965 genre-straining novel was made into a musical way back in 1979, by lyricist Howard Ashman and composer Alan Menken (the duo who would later go on to bring us Little Shop of Horrors and Disney’s The Little Mermaid). Cast Aside Productions revives a brightly wacky God Bless You at the Portland Ballet Studio Theater, under the direction of Celeste Green. 

God Bless You takes us from elite New York City to Eliot’s ancestral mansion back in Rosewater, Indiana, where he decides that he’s going to care about the regular, messed-up people there — because, as he says, no one else does. We move easily between settings, thanks to Cast Aside’s stripped-down set of blocks and just a few choice props: red plastic fireman’s hats, a steering wheel, several phones, and the Rosewater legal file — which literally glows when opened in the hands of the Rosewaters’ scheming lawyer Norman Mushari (Adam Gary Normand). And so away Eliot veers from his senator dad (Craig Capone) and his lovely blonde wife Sylvia (Rachel Jane Henry), and instead embraces a small town of struggling people, many of whom would look not at home in a Norman Rockwell scene.