More theater productions need to have the advisory caution: these shows contain strobes and fog mounted on the house doors. At least then you know that if things start to drag—and, when the night at the theater stretches to four hours, it will—you’re not going to be visually bored. And as the fine people behind the Baltimore Rock Opera Society (BROS) proved with their 2009 production Grundelhammer, boring just isn’t in their repertoire. Overindulgent? Ridiculous? By all means. And over the course of BROS’ two new productions, the proceedings rarely get dull. When the plots do start to congeal a bit, there’s plenty of visual WTF? to prance across the stage: Cue bloody stumps. Cue manly eunuch making a political power play. Cue hot intergalactic trans-species love action. Cue lasers. And then cue lasers about 10,000 more times.

Now ensconced in the Autograph Playhouse at 25th and Charles streets (which the company recently and lovingly refurbished with the volunteer help of a small army), BROS has delivered not one but two over-the-top musical confections. And while far from perfect, as with Grundelhammer, what’s so contagious about the new Amphion and The Terrible Secret of Lunastus is the infectious energy of everybody involved. Neither of these productions is a minor endeavor, each with full casts, costumes, sets, and props, requiring backstage crews and front-of-the-house administration to mount every weekend. Nobody is getting paid to do this, and BROS raised a little more than $4,000 through an online fundraising campaign. If this is what motivated volunteers can do with next to nothing, hell: Why not give Baltimore’s artists a chance to make the city’s schools work?

The evening starts off with Amphion, Dylan Koehler and Aran Keating’s story very, very, very loosely inspired by historical events. The titular Amphion (a scene-stealing Adam Endres) is the musical man to sixth-century Constantinople emperor Justinian (Nairobi Collins), who is trying to broker a treaty with Persian ambassador Borzuya (a fiendish Autumn Weisz), whose headstrong and independent daughter Nasree (Melissa O’Brien) falls under the songcraft spell of Amphion’s wooing ways. Now, a Middle Eastern Muslim woman and a Western Christian man getting hot and heavy was a tad more problematic then than it is today, so no matter how passionate their songs—and, boy howdee, do Endres and O’Brien have some pipes when they want to—their love is a bit star-crossed. And when romantic push comes to political shove, somebody’s gonna lose a hand. Well, Amphion is gonna start losing limbs faster than Sherilyn Fenn in Boxing Helena.

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