I was initially wooed by the idea of adorable sea creature puppets singing and swearing about their life in an “upscale restaurant fish tank” in Nice-eeNice Productions’ Pascal’s Aquarium. But one quickly longs for the YouTube kitten videos at home, which are at least upfront about their adorable meaninglessness.

The story revolves around new arrival Augustine, a purple-ish lobster, who “learns about life” from his singing tankmates, including a seahorse, catfish, pufferfish, piranha, a herd of shrimp and a sea turtle (this must be one crazy big tank). While the individual actors have some strong voices, particularly Augustine’s Vishal Valdya and the pufferfish’s Cheryl Fanene Lane, the production stumbled badly in creating a chorus — at least half the play has the actors singing together in a horribly mismatched screech-fest that makes it difficult to follow or understand.

But what really drags the net down is the script. The songs don’t seem written as songs, but as prose that the actors perform in sing-songy voices, with one meaningless string of words after another (“Maybe there ain’t no doubt / What I say is what I seen”) — in fact it was exactly like watching a group of children on the playground making up a musical from scratch at recess. Anytime a good effort at a joke or suitable fish pun is made, its dead seahorse carcass is beaten to death to make sure we heard it. (Get it? Like beating a dead horse, but in WATER!) And then along swims the “old and spicy catfish” into the scene every so often to let loose a string of profanities, making the play unsuitable for even an easy afternoon with the kids — well, that, and Winnie the sea turtle’s inexplicable crack habit. There’s a point in here somewhere about learning to be comfortable with yourself, but it’s lost at sea.

There are three performances left of Pascal’s Aquarium: July 15 at 10:30 p.m., July 17 at 7:15 p.m., and July 24 at 2 p.m. at Mountain – Mount Vernon United Methodist Church.