Blaine, Missouri is about to reach its 150th anniversary and the town wants to put on a musical about the towns history. Of course, the town has no one with any real musical talent, but that’s not going to stop them. The quirky Corky St. Clair (Christopher Guest) is called upon to direct the show with Lloyd Miller (Bob Balaban) conducting the music.

They then hold rehearsals and end up getting Ron (Fred Willard) and Sheila Albertson (Catherine O’Hara), travel agents in a town of only a few hundred, and Dr. Allen Pearlman (Eugene Levy), the local dentist, and Libby Mae (Parker Posey), who works at the local Dairy Queen, to perform in the show.

In classic Spinal Tap fashion, these people are absolutely terrible but are clueless of the fact and take themselves extremely seriously. In one of the best scenes, Corky St. Clair asks the small town council for $100, 000 for the project and the council members just laugh until they realize he is serious. Enraged by the refusal, Corky quits the production until coaxed into coming back.

The stakes of the production are raised when Corky somehow persuades a New York musical scout named Guffman to come down to Blaine for the show. Convinced they have a shot at bringing their little musical to Broadway, the members put their all into this road show quality production as they anticipate the coming of Mr. Guffman.

Waiting for Guffman is continually funny. At least, it’s continually amusing. It’s more of a sustained smile than out loud laughs. The smiles begin to fade in the last half hour though. Instead of just catching glimpses of the production to let us in on how bad it is, we see pretty much the whole musical from start to finish. It is amusing at first: amusing that the players are taking themselves so seriously and amusing that the audience is so entertained by it all. But before long it just becomes like watching a bad musical.

All the actors are great, but Guest steals the show on this one with his implicitly and stereotypically gay theater aficionado. But even better than Guest in the acting is Guest in the directing and writing. With these types of films, there’s a very fine line between underdoing it and overdoing it. Guest hits the mark right on.

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