Your hat comes off and your heart goes out to anybody with the gumption to attempt to create a new musical. That’s ambitious.

Melissa D’Agostino didn’t just co-write the script to “Mother of All Shows.” She stars in it, sings and dances in it, and directed herself, Wendie Malick and others in this Canadian musical fantasy of mother/daughter issues.

“Mother” is about a daughter (D’Agostino) who dreads checking in with the paralyzed mother (Malick), who can still “annihilate me with a single glance.”

The one thing daughter Liza and mom Rosa could bond over? Old ’70s and ’80s TV variety shows. Walking into the nursing home, Liza is transported, via flickering cathode ray tube TV edits, into “The Rosa Show.”

The sets are cable access cheap — spray painted hula hoops glued together, curtains. The costumes are sequined and off-the-rack looking. The show has “regulars,” such as Liza’s absent Dad (Michael Miranda), passed off as a magician with a good disappearing act, “The Great Gusto.” There’s a multi-talented MC and sketch performer, Bradberry Ignacio James III (Juan Chiaron, excellent) and Liza’s cousin Lisa (Tarah Consoli) comes in to abuse the daughter and alleged “co-star” who can never get out of her “bully” mother’s shadow.

Rosa dances simple choreography with chorus boys, sings her theme song and does a groaning, hit-below-the-belt monologue to her “lentils and germs.”

“Boy, being a parent is over-rated.”

Rosa and Liza spent decades not getting along. Rosa remains defiant about the body shaming disappointment her 39 year-old daughter is. But Liza has her own thoughts about why this relationship is so messed up — her toxic, “needling” mother.

They work this out (kind of) through this variety show of the mind.

Songs about “Mothers and Daughters” and the past blend with silent (black and white) pantomime sketches with Liza’s dad, a dance illustrating how her mother bullied everybody and a break for a “Dating Game” riff, where Liza picks her beau (Daryl Hinds) because whatever her mother thinks, he’s Mr. Right.

Beau Alan sings an “Ain’t Our First Rodeo” tune in cowboy clothes. The concept is funny until the song sort of falls apart.

But I like the way the film’s ambition runs up against the budget. Sets for ’70s variety shows were often scanty and sometimes noticably cheap, and the DIY sets here underscore a “Let’s put on ‘The Carol Burnette Show’, kids” ethos.

The songs, by co-screenwriters David James Brock and D’AGostino and Rebecca Grant, have heartfelt sentiments but almost intentionally clumsy lyrics. D’Agostino and others here come from the Fringe Festival world, where one often sees shows dashed-off in a creative burst, but sorely in need of polishing.

There’s nothing musical here anybody would hum leaving the theater. The singing is adequate, but no more, the dance undemanding.

And every scene drifts on past its payoff. Even the introductory drive to the nursing home is dramatically flat and interminable. It TV terms, it’s an 80 minute film in a 110 minute time slot.

Later sketches and sequences and commercials, all designed to mimic variety shows and their formats, have a “let’s get the writers take another pass or two at this” feel — “cut for time,” in “Saturday Night Live” speak.

Mothers and daughters have their issues and that has been rich material for novelists, poets, playwrights, screenwriters and sitcom creators forever. “Mother of All Shows” was onto something, but doesn’t really make a statement on that subject, and doesn’t entertain much at all as its trying to.

But good on them all for trying.

Rating: unrated, profanity and innuendo

Cast: Wendie Malick, Melissa D’Agostino, Daryl Hinds, Michael Miranda, Juan Chioran and Tarah Consoli.

Credits: Directed by Melissa D’Agostino, scripted by David James Brock and Melissa D’Agostino. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:50