The American Heartland Theatre's dose of sea-salted nostalgia had the strained peppiness of a Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney musical from the 1940s, in which those zany kids staged musicals in barns and high-school gyms. Giving Dames at Sea some valuable tension was Lori Blalock's sustained performance as a Broadway bee-otch who only in the show's closing moments turned soft-hearted. She got to belt a few numbers to the back rows but, more important, gave the character the right mix of elegant narcissism and venomous back-biting.
