Courtesy photo by Dave Mason Lori Lee Gordon, right, plays a doting mother who lavishes attention on her precious dancer-singer daughter Tina, played with cloying confidence by Emily Albrecht.

Lori Lee Gordon is so right for the lead in "Ruthless! The Musical" you'd think she'd been playing it forever. Actually, the accomplished comic actor and singer is assaying the role for the second time this season, having earlier turned in an award-winning performance with the Elite Theatre in Oxnard. She's now wowing audiences at the Simi Valley Cultural Center in an Actors' Repertory Theatre of Simi production.

Gordon plays Judy Denmark, the very model of a perfect '60s mother: calm to a fault, endlessly smiling and perky, polishing and cleaning away any perceived flaw. The business at the beginning of the show in which she fields phone calls so often about her faultless and amazingly talented daughter that she begins to call "I'll get it" even before it rings is hilarious. Later in the show, Denmark becomes the fabulous Ginger DelMarco, in an over-the-top star turn that even comes with her own "Eve" in waiting, sketched with plenty of predatory verve by Elizabeth Stockton.

The focus of Denmark's attention is her precious dancer-singer daughter Tina, played with cloying confidence by Emily Albrecht. It's Tina whose competitive fire brings out the "Ruthless" in the show. She's got her heart set on the role of Pippi Longstocking in a school production of "Pippi in Tahiti," and it seems a slam-dunk until another student, Louise Lerman (amazingly also played by Stockton) snatches the part. Tina snags the understudy gig and it's not long before Louise has an untimely demise.

Coaching Tina along the way is the svelte and very tall Sylvia St. Croix, played so matter-of-factly by Sean P. Harrington that it's easy to forget that she's a he. (He's got a great pair of gams.)

When an unbelievable set of circumstances transforms Judy the mom into Ginger the star, things get even stickier. Judy-Ginger's own (adoptive) mother, Lita Encore (Farley Cadena), a theater critic especially harsh about musicals, shows how vicious her profession can be, while other things fall in and out of control.

Meanwhile, little Tina is sent off to detention and comes back at least temporarily chastened.

Two remaining roles in the show are played by Elissa Wagner as the repressed teacher Myrna Thorn and the aggressive entertainment reporter Emily Block.

All of the above made "Ruthless!" an off-Broadway favorite, with its perennially popular spoofing of stage mothers, precocious kids and drama queens. It works well in Simi Valley, too, with Jan Glasband as producer, Dave Mason as director and Gary Poirot as music director. (Subbing ably for Poirot last weekend was Matthew Park).

— E-mail Rita Moran at ritamoran@earthlink.net