Dancing Dinosaurs at SF's Oasis

A fierce musical spoof of Steven Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park”

The first “Jurassic Park” movie debuted in June 1993, less than a week before I moved across the U.S. to try my luck in San Francisco. What with packing and moving and settling into my new city, I never got around to seeing it. I couldn’t have imagined then that I wouldn’t watch “Jurassic Park” until a couple weekends ago, more than 32 years after its original release. Or that I’d be watching it on Netflix to prepare for the hilarious “Jurassiq Parq,” a live musical parody of the film playing at the Oasis nightclub in San Francisco.

My husband and I went to see it on our seventeenth wedding anniversary. (Gay marriage—something else besides Netflix that didn’t exist in 1993.) I’d already seen a number of memorable shows at Oasis: sendups of Harry Potter, Sex and the City, The Real Housewives franchise, and 9 to 5, not to mention a raunchy live recreation of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. To get into the Jurassic spirit, we went to the show dressed as the Sam Neill character from the movie—

—and we showed up early enough to check out the pre-show décor.

I was glad I’d watched the movie beforehand, or else I wouldn’t have understood the drinks menu:

Clever Girl starred as the evening’s mocktail as well as the inspiration for a T-shirt I found so hilarious, I had to buy one:

The main showroom, smoky with dry ice, evoked the movie’s creepy nighttime opening …

… while Divine’s “Jungle Jezebel” blasted on the loudspeakers. Over the course of the evening, I also heard “Jungle Love,” “Jungle Boogie,” and “Welcome to the Jungle.”

The clueless park owner, here named “Colonel Sanders Hammond” and played by a wonderful Vanilla Meringue, alternated between English-accented cheerfulness and the profanity of that old guy on his front porch shaking his fist at the neighborhood kids.

“Dr. Jeffe Goldblum” (Marshall Forte) alternated between thirst-trap posing and belting out tunes like “Pink Dino Club” in faithful homage to Chappell Roan:

There was also Snaxx, who nailed the conniving motor-mouthiness of the Wayne Knight character:

The two grandchildren (Barbie Bloodgloss and Kitty Litter) were, shall we say, a great deal bawdier than their film counterparts. During intermission, they were gracious enough to pose for a selfie with me, all the time professing that since this was 1993, they had no idea what a “selfie” was:

But, let’s face it, it’s all about the dinosaurs. They did not disappoint. What the show lacked in Spielbergian special effects, they more than made up for with dancing, sequins, and a drag queen-esque fierceness.

In a spot-on parody of the movie’s syrupy raptor-hatching scene, Baby Dinosaur emerges from its egg as a sock puppet, singing in a high-pitched Elmo voice:

The dinosaurs strutted in a catwalk scene that the original movie could’ve used:

The night vision goggles revealed a well-preserved “dinosaur” in the form of D’Arcy Drollinger, Oasis’s owner, at the bar:

And the veloceraptors could’ve doubled as Lady Gaga’s backup dancers, ready to chew both flesh and scenery:

Rowr! “Jurassiq Parq” served up the fun of the original movie while dispensing with the earnestness that weighs the film down. The story’s subtle-as-a-T.-Rex moral—that playing God by resurrecting dinosaurs is, like, a really dumb idea—comes through only at the end, and even then with a light touch. I’m devastated to hear that Oasis will close its doors for good at the end of the year. But I’m confident in my hope that the spirit that “Jurassiq Parq” represents—the talent, the exuberance, and, above all, the courage—will never go extinct in San Francisco.