This month’s theatergoing has left me pleasantly anesthetized—such disparate gems as Passing Strange, Sunday in the Park with George and Xanadu pass their time on the stage with such wit and grace that surrender is easy. Getting a musical right isn’t easy; what’s required is a mysterious alchemy of talent, brains and luck. When it works, good times, happy days; when it doesn’t, oh the emptiness inside.
Cry-Baby, The Musical, opening tonight at the Marriott Marquis, brought me crashing back to earth. Another musical sourcing a John Waters movie, Cry-Baby doesn’t have the subversion, or genuine seediness of the film, or the cleverness of Hairspray, the show it eerily resembles. Like the movie sequels we’ve grown to loathe, Cry-Baby feels as if a focus group had gotten hold of it and beaten the heart out of it, not to mention the sparks of originality that might justify its existence.
Hints of realness occasionally relieve the synthetics. I can’t wait to see James Snyder (who plays the title role) in something that makes better use of those blazing, panicked eyes. A welcome back to the lovely Elizabeth Stanley as the wayward ingénue; last season she was the quiet, heartrending April in John Doyle’s Company. Rob Ashford’s strutting choreography (danced by an excellent male corps) explodes in the number, “A Little Upset,” a driving, escape-from-the-big house sequence that electrified the Marriott Marquis (a death house of a theater if there ever was one); the audience went wild, starved after an act and a half of inertia. Too bad Ashford didn’t direct: a show like this needs either him, a Jerry Mitchell (Hairspray’s director/choreographer) or a Fosse to crack the candy coating and make it spin.