To his credit, Scott Miller is unwavering in his loyalty to creators who push the envelope, like Greg Kotis and Mark Hollman. Their wacky, dystopian Broadway hit, “Urinetown,” is about a city with a water shortage so severe that private toilets have been banned and citizens must pay to use public facilities.

Miller’s New Line Theatre followed its staging of “Urinetown” with a production of Kotis and Hollman’s “Yeast Nation,” which explores a society of one-celled organisms facing an ecological crisis. This musical was not a commercial success, but the concept was novel.

New Line is now presenting the U.S. premiere of Kotis and Hollman’s “ZM (Zombie Musical).” Reaching this milestone has taken a while. The musical had three developmental outings between 2013 and 2015 and another in 2018. The show’s fully staged world premiere was a 2024 Spanish-language production in Mexico City.

New Line has a history of presenting musicals about zombies. The first two were “Night of the Living Dead” in 2013 and “The Zombies of Penzance” (Miller’s own adaptation of a Gilbert and Sullivan classic) in 2018. My rave review of the latter can be viewed on YouTube.

“ZM” starts out in the middle of zombie attack on people we don’t know for a reason we don’t know. The uncertainly of this opening hindered my finding my bearings in the story. Perhaps I am not familiar enough with zombie tropes to recognize references here.

Eventually, the undead attack is traced to a fast-food corporation called Chicken Hutt. It is test-marketing a new sandwich whose sauce is spreading the zombie infection. A pair young of Chicken Hutt employees take on their employer and find love along the way to the learning the truth about the sandwich’s secret sauce.

Zombification is an apt metaphor for the effects of fast food and corporate greed on American society, but I do not find “ZM” to be as fresh or thought provoking as Kotis and Hollman’s earlier works. I will allow that the material in “ZM may be better than it seemed at New Line. The band under music director Jason Eschhofen is excellent, but the production as a whole is not up to the company’s standards.

I may not like everything New Line presents, but I’m glad that the company still makes daring choices. Local theater would be poorer without adventurous programming.

—Gerry Kowarsky

Photo by Jill Ritter Lindberg