A Child Of Atom

Thanks to the generosity of my roommate, (not Mark, he's rarely generous) and the fact that the production is taking and they were papering the hell out of the house tonight I saw Cry-Baby, John Waters latest movie turned Broadway musical.

Over all... okay. Not great, but not terrible. I think my friend Kevin said it best, if this had been an off-Broadway show we would have thought it was great and loved the whole experience. As a Broadway show... it was lacking.

The show wanted to be an over the top parody of 50's morales and attitudes. The "Squares" being perfectly up front and content in their racism and xenophobia. The "Drapers" being perfectly contented in their wrong-side-of-the-tracks lives, pregnant teens, seedy riverbank rendezvous and all.

Somehow they it never went far enough over the top.

For attitude I would compare it to "The Great Trailer Park Musical." It has similar types and themes, but Trailer Park knew where that cusp was and gladly ran it over as they passed by. For parody and camp value I would compare it to "Evil Dead," but there again, Evil Dead plowed beyond any sense of propriety and reveled in its state as something beyond either a musical parody or a parody of the movie. Cry-Baby has the elements, a character in an iron lung, songs about French kissing, a supporting cast that includes a woman with an ass J-Lo would be jealous of, a lunatic, and Harriet Harris. But they kept pulling their punches.

The characters who knew how to play the show like Alli Mauzy who played the aforementioned lunatic Lenore, and Carly Jibson who played the pregnant Pepper (Rikki Lake's role in the movie) pushed their characters to heights (or perhaps depths) that demanded attention. Mauzy in particular was so commanding that even as a background player in dance scenes I was more interested in watching what she was doing than the leads. The rest, sadly including the leads, would get just to the edge of finding what they needed and fall back. I think the biggest example of this was the final number. In a scene that includes 5 characters in star spangled outfits, a man on stilts, a woman in a pie costume, and a woman dressed a giant pack of Lucky Strikes... I expected more. Elizabeth Stanley's patriotic dress (in the picture above) was actually tamer than several of the outfits that she had previously worn in the show, and that sums up the whole show, at the point where they could have been most outrageous, they chose a milder route.

Scenically Scott Pask, whose sets I seem to review a lot, (he designed both Lt. of Inishmoore, and Wedding Singer) did a fine job. The sets were completely passable, though there was nothing splashy or groundbreaking (hmm... same thing I said about Wedding Singer...). The attention to detail was lovely, and there were some really great moments, like the bridal shop, and the license plate factory. But not much that wowed me. Not that I think about it it was actually very similar to Wedding singer, a couple of the set pieces could have been reused (the heroines houses and the suburbia groundrows for instance) with little difficulty.

If anything I'd say go for the dancing. There are some great dance numbers, though someone needs to tell Charlie Sutton that he can take his hand off his crotch every once in a while. Pawing at your balls for the whole show is a poor substitution for characterization.