There's a happy cult over at Point Park University's Pittsburgh Playhouse these days, and it's not presided over by Satan or his crazed druggies as the plot of "Reefer Madness" would have you believe.

	Justin Peebles is Jimmy and Marlana Dunn is Mary Lane in Point Park University's "Reefer Madness." Click photo for larger image. "Reefer Madness" Where: Point Park University at the Pittsburgh Playhouse, Craft and Fifth, Oakland. When: Tonight and Fri. 8 p.m.; Sat. 2 and 8 p.m.; Sun. 2 p.m. Tickets: $12-$14; 412-621-4445.

Instead, it's beholden to Point Park's staff and guest directors who've been putting together some rambunctious musicals.

You need a lot of students, too, when you're working on as many as three big musicals at the same time, as Point Park has recently done. And they need to love what they're doing, as the evidence on stage fairly shouts that they do.

But someone has to choose these things, and you've got to love a faculty that looks beyond the musical classics and comes up with "The Frogs" and "Reefer Madness" in the same season, not to mention "Ragtime" and "for colored girls."

Who would even think of staging "Reefer Madness" (let alone making a musical of it in the first place)? Director Jack Allison, that's who, abetted by 33 students on stage and who knows how many more in the trenches.

For the audience, the result is a drug-free high induced by silliness squared -- at least for those not offended by a semi-nude (well, flesh-colored panties and bras) fantasy orgy or by the ongoing mockery of the demonizing of marijuana.

It took me a little while to get into the mood, perhaps because there were some small continuity glitches where scenes didn't tumble after each other as quickly as they might. But by the orgy, about half-way through Act 1, I succumbed to the goofy logic.

The serious subject of "Reefer Madness" is the 1930s assault on the hemp industry engineered, the program says, by DuPont, William Randolph Hearst and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, who had his niece's husband, Harry J. Anslinger, appointed drug czar. They made "hemp synonymous with marijuana and marijuana synonymous with murder, minorities and insanity," which is pretty much what I learned in the '50s.

The original, mocking "Reefer Madness" film was created out of a 1936 propaganda film. The musical was created by Dan Studney and Kevin Murphy in 2001 (and became a Showtime movie in 2005).

The story of Jimmy Harper's decline into drugged degradation is told by an earnest lecturer. It involves Jimmy's sweet girlfriend, some local drug fiends and eventually Joan of Arc, Satan, George Washington, a satyr, Lady Liberty and Jesus, who's sexiest of all.

The result is something like a modern "Rake's Progress," but in the style of "Little Shop of Horrors," "Rocky Horror" or "Jerry Springer: The Opera."

Michael Karas is deliciously funny as the resolutely somber lecturer, Justin Peebles goes from nerdy to fiendish as Jimmy, and Jayson Portman, Ali Reed, Ashley Schmidt and Kevin Doyle score as the drug pusher and his cabal. But the star is Marlana Dunn as sweet Mary Lane (the anti-Mary Jane, you see), who goes from syrupy patent leather virgin to wild seductress in a blink.

Director Allison and choreographer Kiesha Lalama-White seem to have lifted images from everything from zombie films to "Ozzie and Harriet" to Goya.

The eventual theme is release from obsession, not through drugs but the freedom to think. But you never do know when a brownie might enslave your soul.