Promises, Promises Broadway Reviews

Hayes, Chenoweth and the excellent supporting cast -- including Dick Latessa -- benefit from Ashford's direction: The staging of pop songs has rarely been as sharp as it is in this show. On the other hand, Ashford underwhelms as choreographer, which is odd considering the bang-up dances he created for 'Thoroughly Modern Millie' and 'Cry-Baby.' The biggest letdown is 'Turkey Lurkey Time,' an ensemble number with a single purpose: to kill. Here, it delivers only a flesh wound. But this isn't enough to spoil the fun. 'Promises, Promises' is a candy-flavored ride that more than delivers on its title.

Still, as directed and choreographed by Rob Ashford, the show forges ahead through the sheer force of design elegance, dance-floor stamina, performance energy, and the quick thinking of Hayes. The actor is nimble, funny, likable, and much more asexually wholesome than one might expect given that his character has agreed to allow his philandering bosses to use his midtown apartment for trysts in hopes of securing a promotion. While his performance style flips the calendar ahead to 1990s sitcoms that break the fourth wall, Hayes buoys the show with his generosity. He also compensates for Chenoweth's discomfort in her role (and unflattering wig!) as his love interest, the seemingly innocent coworker who turns out to be yet another company superior's plaything. And when, in a second-act show-stopper, Hayes is paired with agile and hilarious Katie Finneran as a lonely lady at a bar, the two break through barriers of time and setting to produce timeless audience laughs of pleasure.

T hanks to Mad Men fever, the time is right for a revival of Neil Simon, Burt Bacharach, and Hal David's 1968 musical Promises, Promises, itself based on Billy Wilder's 1960 film The Apartment. But there's nothing opportunistic about this production, directed and choreographed by Rob Ashford: He and his cast revel in the show's modest but potent charms instead of attacking the material with superior everything-was-so-corny-back-then winks and nudges. It treats Bacharach’s melodies as the buoyant, intricate structures that they are, not just weird curios from another age. Set in 1962 Manhattan, the show is pleasingly retro without being a kitsch comic book: Even its Eames-a-go-go sets (by Scott Pask), as colorful and fun as they are, speak more of cocktail-cabinet sophistication than yard-sale tackiness.

The Broadway Theatre's musical adaptation of Billy Wilder's classic film 'The Apartment' has clearly tapped into the '60s era nostalgia so vividly rendered by the AMC television series. While there are plenty of quibbles to be found in this production directed and choreographed by Rob Ashford and starring Sean Hayes (in his Broadway debut) and Kristin Chenoweth, it's a generally winning evening that restores a much-needed dose of musical comedy to Broadway.

The hypnotic Burt Bacharach beat remains undiminished some four decades after it was unleashed in 'Promises, Promises,' the 1968 musical now getting an agreeable if not altogether transporting revival on Broadway.

The endearing Hayes excels at his nebbishy physical comedy and zany confidences with the audience, but still seems nervous in the wrong ways when he sings. More problematic is the talented but miscast Chenoweth, who tries to work against her patented micro-Valkyrie persona but remains too strong and mature for Fran. Two famous songs—“I Say a Little Prayer” and “A House Is Not a Home”—have been added for her; although the second one actively contradicts the plot, in a way it is this production’s theme song. Large and kitschily well-appointed, Promises, Promises has the faint inside echo of an unsold McMansion.

Director-choreographer Rob Ashford's stylish production is marked by choreography so athletic that you can sense an ecstatic freedom in the movement. Still, the book scenes look too stretched out on the noticeably large Broadway Theatre stage. Neil Simon's book is endlessly funny, while Burt Bacharach and Hal David's pop score, which uses background vocals in most songs, is catchy and tuneful. Thank heavens that Jonathan Tunick's original orchestrations are being used as well.

The new production, directed and choreographed by Rob Ashford, is stylish and handsome, but only occasionally memorable. Aside from the pop gems, catchy as ever (try to shake the brassy title number and 'I'll Never Fall in Love Again'), the dancing is dynamic and Katie Finneran is side-splitting as a boozy bar crawler. Otherwise, it's a so-so mixed bag. Blame the show itself and the new redo.

And therein lies the problem with Hayes' key performance in Rob Ashland's intermittently amusing but emotionally unsatisfying revival. This invulnerable Chuck feels pre-packaged and self-contained. He doesn't seem to want or need anything, including that troubled waitress. And although Hayes' Chuck talks to us all night, you never really feel that anything has been revealed.

Director/choreographer Rob Ashford is less resourceful than usual and only intermittently effective; his big idea here seems to be to add dancers doing the frug in the background. It is not Ashford's fault that Michael Bennett's original staging of 'Turkey Lurkey Time,' the big first-act production number, is easily viewable on the Internet; but it is that energy and humor that is altogether missing from the current staging.

Promises was hardly a dud in its first and only previous Broadway incarnation, running for more than three years and earning leading man Jerry Orbach a Tony Award. And its tuneful score includes such Burt Bacharach/Hal David favorites as the title number and I'll Never Fall in Love Again. But the songs strain to fit Neil Simon's messy book, which lurches from hokey comedy to movie-of-the-week melodrama. And this new production seems to have two main goals: to exploit contemporary audiences' taste for retro kitsch and, more nobly, to provide a vehicle for a few talented stars.

Even that singing sparkplug Kristin Chenoweth, who stars opposite a charming Sean Hayes in his Broadway debut, seems to feel the prevailing lassitude. “Promises, Promises,” which features a book by Neil Simon and songs by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, comes fully to life only briefly, at the beginning of its second act, when a comic volcano named Katie Finneran erupts into molten hilarity. Otherwise the white-hot charms this musical is said to have once possessed are left sleeping.

Sean Hayes is surprisingly charming and ingratiating as Baxter, and Katie Finneran steals the show for the scene and a half she’s in, bringing a much-needed comic jolt as the floozy Baxter picks up in a dive on Christmas Eve. But Kristin Chenoweth—who earned not just entrance applause but also entrance shrieks on the night I attended—seems miscast as Baxter’s love interest, Miss Kubelik: It’s impossible to imagine that such a no-nonsense dynamo would ever fall for Baxter’s conniving boss, much less try to kill herself when he jilts her.

Rob Ashford’s direction prizes yuks over truth, symbolized by a period chair in Sheldrake’s office that exists solely for a visual joke requiring utterly unbelievable behavior from Sheldrake, while Ashford's busy choreography can’t erase memories of Michael Bennett’s delightfully simple “She Likes Basketball” or orgiastic “Turkey Lurkey Time.” Set designer Scott Pask imprisons the show in a wraparound cyclorama reminiscent of the Berlin Wall.

If you need to understand why Broadway - not to mention America - needed to change in 1968, take a look at 'Promises, Promises,' the emotionally and musically stunted show that opened the same year as 'Hair' and entertained the tired-businessman market for three boffo years. More baffling is the motivation for a major revival of the dated Neil Simon/Burt Bacharach musical-comedy (based on the superior 1960 movie 'The Apartment') about male-driven corporate sexual shenanigans in 1962. Unless exploitation of 'Mad Men' fashions can be passed off as motive. Nor is it likely that dream casting is the justification for director/choreographer Rob Ashford's busy and charmless production.

Rob Ashford's new revival, frenetically aerobic and sleek, stars Sean Hayes, so busy knowing he's funny that you never believe the hero's suffering, and Kristin Chenoweth, the Teflon actress, to whom no emotion ever sticks. Two awkwardly interpolated Bacharach-David hits from the period demonstrate what second-rate stuff (excepting 'I'll Never Fall in Love Again') the team turned out for the show's actual score. In supporting roles, Tony Goldwyn and Dick Latessa inject some momentary reality into the metallic gloss.

This brings us to the director-choreographer Rob Ashford, who has given us too much choreography and not enough direction, or the wrong kind. Ballet invades the action at almost every step, and farce is doggedly squeezed out of every conceivable moment. Such hyperactivity makes jokes cancel out one another, and doesn’t allow musical numbers to provide sufficient respite.

I haven't said anything about Rob Ashford's staging because there's not much to say other than that it's bland and unamusing. Rarely have so many jokes been stepped on so firmly. The only scene that takes off is the one in which Mr. Hayes picks up a drunken bimbo in a bar. The bimbo in question, fortunately, is Katie Finneran, who steals the show right out from under her famous colleagues. Ms. Finnernan received most of the applause during the curtain call at the preview I saw, and earned it. Also worthy of note is Scott Pask, whose elaborate set is a knowing sendup of corporate midcentury modernism (even the paintings on the walls of the offices of Consolidated Life are clever parodies of Arshile Gorky and Morris Louis). Mr. Pask and Ms. Finneran both deserve to be remembered when this year's Tonys are handed out. Saving their redeeming presences, 'Promises, Promises' is slick, pointless and forgettable.