Theater review: Peter Marks on '[title of show]' at Signature Theatre
By Peter Marks
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Appreciating "[title of show]" is not predicated entirely on being acquainted with Dee Hoty, Ken Billington or Comden and Green. (For the record: a Broadway musical actress, a Broadway lighting designer and a bygone Broadway songwriting team.) You don't have to know, either, that "Henry, Sweet Henry" was a failed musical based on the movie "The Life of Henry Orient," or that Roma Torre is the veteran drama critic for the New York news cable channel, NY1.
Let's just say that total recall of the Internet Broadway Database wouldn't hurt. Getting the references is part of the fun of this cuter-than-adorable chamber musical, which is receiving a sweetly in-the-know treatment by Signature Theatre, that regional cathedral of St. Show Tune the Divine.
With a libretto by Hunter Bell and a score by Jeff Bowen, the work finds an agreeable home in Signature's smaller, 110-seat theater, the Ark, where it is staged by director-choreographer Matthew Gardiner with a few chairs and incidental props. The accompaniment is provided by a single keyboardist, Gabriel Mangiante, and so the predominant feeling, reinforced by the elan of the four young singing actors, is that of an after-hours cabaret, one at which the musical-theater cognoscenti gather to revel in their love of the arcane ins and outs of the biz.
It's the kind of postmodern entertainment that wraps you in an ever-tighter self-conscious hug. And as we know, sometimes, a friend's affectionate squeeze can go on a teensy bit longer than we're prepared to accommodate. Such is the sensation with "[title of show]," whose cleverness about the vicissitudes of writing a musical ultimately wears a little thin. Not in a patience-trying way, but in the clear sense of a concept stretched to the limits of its elasticity.
The hall-of-mirrors premise has characters named Hunter (James Gardiner) and Jeff (Sam Ludwig) composing a show they call "[title of show]" for a festival of new musicals. Their musical is about the writing of the musical for the festival, and they dragoon two friends (Jenna Sokolowski and Erin Driscoll), actresses trying to make it in musical theater, to be in the show. Their characters, Susan and Heidi, are named for the actresses, Susan Blackwell and Heidi Blickenstaff, who originated the parts in the New York production that ran successfully off-Broadway and moved in summer 2008 to Broadway for a short spell.
So you get tuneful songs such as "Filling Out the Form" and "Development Medley" and "Awkward Photo Shoot," and a cascade of Pirandellian moments in which the characters telegraph the fact that they know they are real people trapped in a work of fiction. "Just put this exact conversation in the show!" Hunter says. "Wait -- so everything I say from now on could actually be in our show?" Jeff replies. And on and on. Though a little of this goes a long way, the name-dropping can be gratifying, especially during a song in which the cast pulls from a box the Playbill covers of old musical flops. (In a smart and funny bit of self-deprecation, a program is produced for "Glory Days," the Signature musical that closed ignominiously immediately after its Broadway opening -- and had as its co-creator James Gardiner.)
Onto the material the cast slathers the correct magnitude of irony, and under the direction of Matthew Gardiner -- James's brother -- the actors convey, for the most part, an appealingly relaxed idea of being in on the joke. In the rapport between, as one Bowen song has it, "Two Nobodies in New York," Ludwig and James Gardiner conjure both the fatalism and hope endemic to the plight of struggling songwriters. And vocally, Driscoll has a very fine moment with the late-in-the-evening memory song, "A Way Back to When."
"[title of show]" is strictly for the Signature set. It's aimed at a slice of the market that shares in the sort of love Driscoll croons about, the pleasures derived from recollections of "hearing Andrea McArdle sing from the hi-fi in the den." You don't know McArdle? Oh, boy. Well, the show in the Ark may leave you cold. And still, the sun'll come out, tomorrow.
Book by Hunter Bell, music and lyrics by Jeff Bowen. Directed and choreographed by Matthew Gardiner. Set, Adam Koch; costumes, Kristopher Castle; lighting, Mark Lanks; sound, Matt Rowe. About 90 minutes.
