Heard of Lawrencia Ann “Bambi” Bembenek who, in 1982, was convicted under very dubious circumstances of brutally slaying her husband’s ex-wife?

Most of the audience at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater Thursday night knew exactly who “Bambi” Bembenek was, a former cop, a sometime bunny at the old Playboy resort in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and an escapee from Wisconsin’s Taycheedah Correctional Institution, whereafter she spent the rest of her very tough life either on the lam or trying to clear her name. On the local news, Bambi was at once a siren, a serial temptress in tight pants, a jealous spouse and a Badger State Thelma without much of a Louise for help.

And, as improbable as this may seem, this weekend she gets her own musical, a raucous blast of a show with a killer score by Gordon Gano of Milwaukee’s own folk-punk band the Violent Femmes. It’s a musical that manages to re-examine her cold case and declare an unconscionable miscarriage of justice while at the same time capturing both the fun and the struggles of growing up as a working-class Polish American girl in the city of Milwaukee in the 1970s, dreaming of being one of Charlie’s Angels.

Oh, and you could see this audience remembered all of that: the bars, the blame, the boogie and the boys in blue. Not to mention the corruption, the complicit media and the cover-ups from the higher-ups. Bambi, a blond bombshell far from the Hollywood strip, gets her retro-feminist moment, all right. And it’s a pleasure to experience

Part of the fun of “Run, Bambi, Run,” which is staged with irreverently determined joy by director Mark Clements, is being reminded of the power of the local when it comes to regional theater, a sector of the American industry that too often doesn’t notice the juicy stories right outside its own doors. But I think this show, which has a book by the Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble member Eric Simonson and a terrific lead performance from Erika Olson, could be a refreshing, populist entry in a coming Broadway season. With some more work.

Here’s the good stuff: Clements stages the show with an open theatricality. It feels as if we were in one of Milwaukee’s legions of blue-collar bars, watching a local band of musicians. Imagine a Wisconsin version of “Once,” albeit with shades of Willy Russell’s “Blood Brothers” and more betrayal than love in the air.

The guitarists and the horn players enact Bambi’s early life: her struggles at the sexist police academy, her lucky choice in loving parents but her bad choice in partners, both professional (the excellent Jessica Kantorowitz plays Judy, one of the several women who would both befriend and betray her) and personal (Armando Gutierrez plays her scheming husband Fred) and her bouncing around from cop to waitress to security guard.

All of that stuff, told with a paradoxically fun sense of impending doom, takes us almost to intermission. But right before the break, there is the crime: Christine, Fred’s first wife, is dead in bed. And the Milwaukee cops, facing a separate discrimination suit from Bambi, have good reason to cook the books and fry the deer in the headlights.

That’s the first moment when the otherwise tight show stutters: It’s caught between wanting to keep the audience in the dark as the mystery unfolds slowly and wanting to roar with feminist musical indignation about what happened to the surely innocent Bambi (although the historical record does allow she likely knew more than she let on.) It wants the calls of “Free Bambi,” a la “Free Britney,” but also the Brechtian remove. The result is that the crime at the center of the story is too muddily staged and its circumstances rushed. That needs a fix.

In Act 2, the show gets back on track, fast, and we get a series of the astonishing real-life travails in the life of Bambi, involving Dr. Phil and his bodyguards (really happened), a jailbreak and some yet-more-surprising later revelations.

Lingering mystery or not, the show leaves you outraged on Bambi’s behalf: this is the best kind of political theater: sly, sexy, slippery and seductive. And, mercifully, Clements has assembled a very non-actorly cast. All of them feel like they could be Milwaukee cops or waitresses; the show is about paying attention to ordinary lives and, although I’d pull back a couple of the more outré ensemble performances in the interests of veracity, it is staged without condescension. They can smell condescension a mile away in Milwaukee.

Frankly, I was knocked out by the variety in Gano’s score, which has everything from faux-disco satire to Polish polkas to punkish anger songs to soaring ballads that sit quite wonderfully with Olson’s voice. It’s the kind of song suite that will appeal to multiple generations, a careful collection of songs, rooted in a recognizable Midwest milieu that any longtime Chicagoan will understand.

The show is at least 15 minutes too long and I thought it was over at least twice before it was. Simonson wants to pack in too much (I doubt the real Bambi would have compared her false friend to Benedict Arnold) and he’ll have to let some of that go. Those cuts are easy to make, surely a lot easier than anything in Bambi’s fraught life.

Makes for a heck of a true-crime musical, though. Worth the drive for Violent Femmes fans, new-musical followers and those who enjoy being reminded how much the 1970s sucked, that being one of the best songs in the show.

Theater Loop

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Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

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Review: “Run Bambi Run”

When: Through Oct. 22

Where: Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s Quadracci Powerhouse, 108 E. Wells St., Milwaukee

Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes

Tickets: $20-$90 at 414-224-9490 and milwaukeerep.com