Carson Higgins, Quiana Onrae'l Holmes, SLee, Ethan Crystal, Garrett Poladian, Jarred Bedgood, Julian Diaz-Granados, and Lea Nardi Photo courtesy of The Tank

Okay, I'm paraphrasing a little, but a major point composer/bookwriter/lyricists Ethan Crystal and Garrett Poladian emphasize from time to time during their crazily mindless bit of joyful nonsense titled Golem Owned a Tropical Smoothie is that the title character is absolutely named after the public domain Golem of Jewish folklore and, as the ensemble company sings out, "it has nothing to do with The Ring."

But try telling that to the lawyer who sits in the audience throughout act two taking notes.

Directed at a suitably exuberant pace by Patrick Swailes Caldwell, the modestly produced mounting at The Tank features a talented young cast and exudes a genuine affection for musical theatre with an off-beat sense of humor.

Set in Panama City, Florida, the Golem in question is represented by a life-sized stick-figure puppet, designed and voiced by Poladian and maneuvered by both authors. Aside from being a snazzy song-and-dance vaudevillian, Golem, indeed, owns a small independent Tropical Smoothie shop. It's the last remaining one in the Southeast corridor that hasn't been bought up and turned into a slickly corporate Smoothie Kingdom by the evil CEO Smeegle, the same puppet with a mop-top wig, voiced by Crystal like Mandy Patinkin at his most intense.

"Over the past six months," goes the exposition, "Smoothie Kingdom has acquired Smootharama, Smootherific, Double Smoothie, Triple Smoothie," and "I Can't Believe That Wasn't A Smoothie."

This is especially bad news for high school student and Tropical Smoothie cashier Ian (played with sweet earnestness by understudy Jarred Bedgood at the performance I attended), since Smoothie Kingdom is staffed with AI instead of people.

Described by the authors as "a walking bong," Ian's co-worker Kyle (Carson Higgins in carefree stoner model) is doing his best to keep the struggling business afloat by concocting smoothies made from non-traditional ingredients, both questionably edible and questionably legal. He also has a secret yearning for Ian's older sister Gabby (Lea Nardi, grounding the show with crisp, no-nonsense maturity), who has become a parent figure in the absence of their mom and dad.

The game changer arrives in the form of an irresistibly delicious smoothie called the Green Dragon, a role sung with irresistibly delicious bluesy force by understudy Slee when I attended. It's a performance so enjoyable that it justifies the script's mid-performance negotiation for a better contract.

With a plot that purposely goes off into tangents, some inside theatre jokes that are a bit brainier than the typical Rent or Les Miz references, and a zippy showtune style score orchestrated for a small combo by music director Stephen Murphy, Golem Owned a Tropical Smoothie has no greater ambition than to be funny and entertaining. And it succeeds at that greatly for a ticket price of less than $30.