Review of 'The Thing About Men'

 

The Thing About Men, the new musical at the Promenade Theatre, is misnamed, as was the 1985 German film Men (Manner in German) on which it's based. They both make just as many generalizations about women, and with both sexes the "things" apply only to specific types. Though the title may suggest some kind of earnest discourse on male nature, the show delivers a much less weighty story.

It also requires a wholesale suspension of disbelief, as a married woman and her paramour fail to detect her husband's vindictive charade despite patently hard-to-ignore coincidences. If you're willing to go along with their obliviousness, you'll get caught up in the playfulness with which songwriters Joe DiPietro and Jimmy Roberts and director Mark Clements adapted the story. The presence of matinee idol-ish leading man Marc Kudisch doesn't hurt either!

Kudisch portrays Tom, who's dismayed when he spots a hickey on his wife's neck, since he hasn't been anywhere near her neck in over a week. His high-powered job at an advertising agency, fling with a woman in his office and tooling around in his Porsche have kept him too busy for that.

Tom's wife, Lucy (Dance of the Vampires survivor Leah Hocking), has taken up with bohemian, long-haired painter Sebastian (Ron Bohmer), who lives in a loft and works at Starbucks. While spying on him, Tom discovers that Sebastian is looking for a roommate. Introducing himself as Milo, Tom persuades Sebastian to let him move in. As he attempts to sabotage the affair, "Milo" becomes good friends with Sebastian.

Okay, it is ridiculous that while Sebastian knows Lucy's husband is an advertising executive who has vanished without explanation and "Milo" is an ad exec who just split from his wife, not even Milo's intrusive interest in Sebastian, or tendency to injure him, or refusal to let Lucy see his face when she visits the loft for brunch arouse any suspicion (not to mention the coincidence that the strawberry pancakes served for brunch are both Lucy's husband's and Milo's "favorite"). These illogicalities don't ruin the show; it's just perplexing why book writer DiPietro would leave, or create, plot holes that would have been so easy to fill. Tom could lie to Sebastian about his job just as he lies about his name, for instance, and he could use his cellphone to stay in touch with Lucy yet prevent her from locating him. And even though it came straight from the movie, there had to be a more graceful way for Milo to hide his face from Lucy than donning a gorilla mask and galumphing around on all fours, an act that elicits inexplicable reactions from Lucy (thoroughly amused and charmed) and Sebastian (incensed because it prevents the two important people in his life—his lover and some guy he's known for a couple of weeks—from meeting properly).

DiPietro and Roberts collaborated previously on I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change, the longest-running revue ever to play in New York (now in its seventh year off-Broadway). Their Thing About Men score is decent, though some songs sound alike and there's gratuitous profanity in the book and libretto—most indelicately (and unnecessarily) in the song "Downtown Bohemian Slum." DiPietro is also guilty of such clumsy dialogue as Sebastian imploring Milo not to move because "I can't afford this place on my own," followed by "It's not about the money" when Milo offers to pay the rent after he leaves.

But the book improves on its source material in the first act. The movie provided very little background on the characters, and while they're not complex enough to warrant a whole lot of exposition, what's been added to the musical gets us more involved in their lives. This stage version is also a lot funnier, with a barrage of wisecracks and sight gags in the first act. The film seemed to take itself more seriously, but the plot is better suited to farce. However, in the second act, the play veers away from farce and gets overly sentimental. The thing about men is that even when they're emotionally intimate with each other, they don't behave the way women do—but Sebastian and Milo interact in a manner that's too feminized (body-slamming excepted). Act 2 is also dragged down by a dispensable sequence in a restaurant that helps Sebastian discover how devoted he is to Lucy. In fact, "Me, Too," his duet with his blind date, could be a leftover from I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change.

While Kudisch nails another irresistible-cad role as Tom, the meatiest roles in The Thing About Men belong to the supporting performers, Jennifer Simard and Daniel Reichard, who play a variety of parts and serve as the Greek chorus. Their roles have all the funny voices, accents, personality quirks and hairdos, so not surprisingly they—Simard in particular—all but steal the show. Bohmer makes a good hippie, except his hippie doesn't seem very committed to his lifestyle. He covets status symbols like a Porsche and admission to a snooty restaurant, and decides rather readily to forsake his screw-the-establishment values. And if he's so in touch with his girlfriend's feelings, wouldn't he realize that his bohemianism is what's attractive to her?

If DiPietro hadn't been so careless with details, The Thing About Men would be a very gratifying musical. Its tunefulness, gimmickry and that cutie Kudisch remain selling points; just don't bother looking for plausibility: That's MIA right up to the curtain call.

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