If you attend enough theatre, the odds are in your favor that you will see some shows that simply defy credibility; that make you wonder not merely "Who on earth wrote this?" but "What producer agreed to give this show money?" And then, inevitably, you begin to wonder what the original pitch was like. What happened at that first meeting when Michael Gore, Dean Pitchford and Lawrence D. Cohen said to Rocco Landesman, "It's Stephen King's book, but with singing! And dancing!" Or when Jim Steinman first said to James Nederlander, "They're vampires! And they dance!" Or when Joe Brooks first said to Joe Brooks, "There just aren't enough musicals about people with Tourette's Syndrome. I should fix that. And I'll get Joe Brooks to direct it."
Those moments that made Broadway history may have been somewhat like
Gutenberg! The Musical!, a deliciously horrifying concoction of ego and earnestness currently running at 59E59. Created by Scott Brown and Anthony King of Upright Citizens Brigade fame, the manic musical imagines the atrocious backer's audition for the atrocious eponymous bio-musical. Bud and Doug have stars in their eyes and a song in their hearts, but not a clue in their heads. With no cast to play the numerous roles in their grandiose show, the fictionalized co-creators of the musical-within-a-musical play all the parts themselves, with only labeled hats to indicate who is playing whom as they search for their own Bialystock & Bloom.
It's as silly as you'd expect, with plenty of campy awfulness to let us laugh at the naïveté of this misguided creative team. And were that all
Gutenberg! The Musical! were about, it would probably be amusing enough. But what raises the show above kitsch is Bud and Doug's heartfelt enthusiasm and genuine good intentions. We can all laugh at clueless idiots, but Brown and King give their characters enough heart to make their ambitions sympathetic. Their presentation, which is as much about Bud and Doug and their own follies, carries just enough emotion to give the comedy some depth.
As the blindly optimistic co-creators,
Christopher Fitzgerald and
Jeremy Shamos are winsome and tragically adorable, effortlessly playing off of each other's energy. It would be easy for them to wink at the audience and show distain for their pathetic characters, but instead, they make them sympathetic, and worse, downright
likable. By the show's end, we want to see these guys succeed, no matter how bad their musical is. That's a hard feat to pull off. Even Franz Liebkind couldn't do it.
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