Oh dear, it's been a month since I've updated....
Anyway...
I don't mean to be overly pessimistic or mean, but really - this has to be one of the worst seasons for new musicals in recent memory. Let's look at the list so far: Xanadu, Young Frankenstein, The Little Mermaid, Passing Strange, In The Heights, Cry-Baby, and the yet to start previews A Catered Affair. Of those I've seen (everything but A Catered Affair), there is only one (yes ONE) that I could with a straight face put in the category of "good" (In The Heights), and even that's not great (thanks to it's corny book), but so far it's the best of a really sorry lot. I had high hopes for Cry-Baby and A Catered Affair, but I went to the third preview of Cry-Baby tonight, and well, I guess all of my eggs of hope are going in A Catered Affair's basket.
Cry-Baby basically falls in the same category of Xanadu and Young Frankenstein - a tongue-in-cheek, campy, based on a movie, musical comedy. Like Xanadu, this is a show that seems to have tried to move into a theatre like the Variety Arts off-Broadway, discovered it had been turned into condos, and just kept walking up the street until it hit Broadway. And like Young Frankenstein, the creators seem to have missed the point of musical comedy - in order to be a successful musical, you don't just need any old music, you need tuneful, catchy songs with hopefully witty lyrics; and in order to be a successful musical COMEDY, you actually need material that's funny. You'd think this sort of thing would be common sense. But once again, we have a show with generic sounding, (this time 50's pop inspired), bland songs, and lines that I'm sure were supposed to be each and every one a gem, but instead of diamonds, we get something more akin to cubic zirconium. And for that matter, not only do the jokes all fall flat - both in the book and in the lyrics - but the book has trouble really making any sense. And that inept book is from the same writers who did so well adapting John Waters' Hairspray (Mark O'Donnell and Thomas Meehan). Maybe we just needed Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman to write the score, and Jack O'Brien to direct, and then we could have some sort of entertaining musical.
The cast is a pretty sorry lot. The ensemble is fine, Harriet Harris (who bewilderingly plays the grandmother, though she isn't nearly old enough for the part - maybe there was some sort of joke there that I totally missed?) tries her best with really rotten material (her big second act solo is particularly excruciating), but James Snyder, who is making his Broadway debut in the title role, walks around looking something like the living dead the entire time, and really just has no starry sparkle at all - he does a decent Elvis impression at the end, but that's about the only mark he makes. Honestly, anyone in the cast could be replaced - even at intermission - and I don't think anyone in the audience would notice. With the possible exception of Alli Mauzey's Lenora and Chester Gregory II's Dupree, who are particularly weird, they're really just a generic bunch of interchangeable pretty faces.
I will say, that while I found the first act to be torture, the second act was (probably due to my through the floor low expectations), intermittently tolerable. There's a peppy song in the jail, made actually sort of exciting thanks to Rob Ashford's excellent choreography (the choreography, by the way, was the only thing that was really exciting or noteworthy in the show), and the final scene was something close to entertaining, I think. The music started to get a little catchier, and the jokes a little funnier, but I think I was so desperate for something entertaining at that point, that I may have just given in to its mediocrity. But I guess when a show is so bad, what would normally be mediocre can be thought of as fun.
I don't think I mentioned the sets yet, but they are totally unremarkable. The only thing strange I noticed was there was one scene where one character is outside a wedding shop, and looking at a wedding dress, and another character comes up and asks if he is looking at wedding rings. And for some reason he says yes. When it is perfectly obvious that there is not a ring in sight in that window. It's a wedding dress. You'd think they could have filled the window with rings to suit the line, but that's the sort of lack of attention to detail... or any entertainment value for that matter, that this show severely lacks.
People are always complaining about all of the revivals (though I think Faith Prince said in an "A Catered Affair" interview (this is me paraphrasing) that why do people complain about revivals of musicals, when opera houses will do Puccini season after season, and there's nary a peep?), two of the (by far) best musicals on Broadway right now are revivals: "Sunday in the Park With George," and "Gypsy." Maybe if we could get some good new musicals on Broadway, we wouldn't need to pull out "Gypsy" again for it's fortieth revival in forty-one years.
I really really really hope "A Catered Affair" is good.
