Link: 'Wedding Singer': Back to the '80s.
This sounds like a nightmare on stage. We have seen about 45minutes worth of the film and found it insufferable. The portrayal of a Boy George impersonator is graceless and inherently homohating. It is neither clever, nor funny.
I'm incredibly disappointed that Kevin Cahoon should take such a role. He was a Hedwig. I saw him do a superb Childcatcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Now he's taking his skills to this pre-passed turd.
Im glad I did my Broadway binge last year, the pickings are terribly slim this year.
Exceprts from the review give some sense how badly this one might stink. It's lucky the Hirschfeld is relatively isolated, the smell shouldn't permeate neighbouring shows.
Mainstream musicals were once inspired by Sholom Aleichem, Thornton Wilder and George Bernard Shaw. In an era when we've become far more adept at recognizing brands than genius, though, Broadway is devoting a lot more resources to piggybacking on proven pop success -- the oeuvre, say, of Abba and Oprah.
The Wedding Singer," which opened last night at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre -- without Sandler or his fetching cinematic love interest, Drew Barrymore -- feels like a show composed as much at a board meeting as a keyboard. It's got vim and, in supporting performances by Felicia Finley and especially the appealing Matthew Saldivar, bona fide comic vigor. Yet a premise this flimsy -- one asking for your Joblike forbearance of jokey references to the 1980s -- requires two crucial elements this show does not have: a corker of a score, and a leading man and lady who can do something like spontaneously combust.
Stephen Lynch and Laura Benanti, as Jersey boy and girl in this standard-issue story of boy-meets-girl, are made for musicals, but not for each other. Lynch, a comedian by trade, is all nervous standup energy, and Benanti, a nifty Cinderella in the 2002 Broadway revival of "Into the Woods," is shown to better advantage in parts with an undercoat of steel. These kids don't mix naturally. He's overeager to please, and she seems hardly eager at all.
A more fundamental deficit, however, is the desperate lengths to which director John Rando and book writers Chad Beguelin and Tim Herlihy go to stir up nostalgia for the 1980s, the not particularly evocative period in which the musical takes place. Although the show mercifully sidesteps the Challenger disaster and Iran-contra, it does reacquaint us with the styling of mullets, the exhibitionism of Madonna and the shoes of Imelda Marcos. ("Flashdance" is invoked not once but twice.) The facile '80s gags go on and on until the final scene, by which time you might feel as if you have seriously OD'd. As in over-decaded.
The show begins, vibrantly, at a wedding at which Lynch's Robbie Hart is the lead singer, accompanied by his band mates, played by Saldivar and, wearing a Boy George getup, Kevin Cahoon. The songwriting team of Beguelin and Matthew Sklar put their best work up front, in the up-tempo opening number, "It's Your Wedding Day," featuring spunky choreography by Rob Ashford. (Sklar and Beguelin are also the authors of "The Rhythm Club," a musical that had a premiere at Signature Theatre in 2000.)
Long after inspiration ceases, the band plays on in "The Wedding Singer." The show might acquire a cachet, as a kind of safe family fallback. But no one has to feel much urgency about getting to it. Soon, another show very much like it is bound to arrive.
Plans were announced this week, in fact, for a forthcoming musical version of "Legally Blonde."
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