| . | 04/27/2008
CRY- BABY
By: Eugene Paul
James Snyder and Elizabeth Stanley
Photo by Joan Marcus
If anybody tries to tell you that Cry-Baby is just Grease lite tell him to stick his head back in the oven until he’s conscious. Cry- Baby comes on as one of the wickedest sendups to have hit the not so Great White Way, including satirizing itself. Now, how’s that for sheer chutzpah and vinegar? With a book written by our own local fat cat, Grand old Man of Show Biz, Thomas Meehan with co-author prize winner Mark O’Donnell , it pillories and skewers everything about the American 50’s, then zings it to us with an absurd, big finale of how everything is getting better and better. Yeah, right. You leave the theater exhilarated with a “wait a minute, wait a minute, what happened there…” kind of afterglow. Thank goodness after closing they shoot out a little of that same peppy music they played before the show began to sort of settle you down. Cute. (All musicals, please copy.)
Oh, what a show. It flatly uses the pat language of musical comedy scenery and costumes to make fun of the scenery and costumes and they are some of designers Scott Pask and Cathering Zuber’s cleverest commentaries. And a totally keyed in, wonderful company delivers the oh-so-dry goods. Delicious. They have ticklingly funny shtick to work with. If Meehan and O’Donnell set up squirmingly absurd situations (we open with the “Anti-Polio” Picnic!...And, yes, they razz a patient in an Iron Lung but didn’t we actually trundle them around for fund raisers back then? How crass is that?) The lyrics of David Javerbaum set to Adam Schlesinger’s deliberately satirical music ridicule every clever lyric you’ve ever heard in another show with some of the funniest stretches for rhymes you’ve ever heard. I think my favorite sequence is Cry- Baby’s giddy play on the word “tongue” when he is teaching deliciously dopey Allison how to kiss with lots of tongue action as they sit, totally alone, under the stars on his favorite, lonely dock out among the lonely starlit hummocks of the bayou. Hmmm. Bayou? When we were just in Philadelphia? And also in Baltimore? Well, yes, but this is a musical, remember? And them hummocks ain’t lonely one bit. There’s lots of humma humma going on. And tongue action. Did I say that this is a wickedly funny show?
Not quite your usual plot, either. If you think murders and Commies and pinko pacifists are tasteless objects of humor you’re going to be blind sided. Mom, the flag and apple pie, funny? Ever see an apple pie on gorgeous legs? And legs, well, then how about the fishnet tights on the new nun, reformed hotpants Wanda? Not funny? Then you’re on the light side yourself. Of course they are. That’s the whole point: Nothing is sacred. How about the very pregnant barely teenager? Ho ho ho. And Lenora, the nut case? (Alli Mauzey is great) And the lying scum of the nicest boy in town (Christopher Hanke) who’s gonna steal the frabjous Allison (Elizabeth Stanley) right out from under Cry-Baby’s cute nose? And then there’s Harriet Harris, probably the deftest practitioner of low high comedy and/or high low comedy there is in showbiz. Her winks and nods wipe out whole battalions. Harris plays Allison’s oh, so proper Grandmother, the sweetest lady in town. Can you imagine her doing a soliloquy in Schlesinger music and Javerbaum verse laying bare her very soul in which you find out she is responsible for the deaths of Cry-Baby’s parents? And brings down the house because she’s so damned funny?! Is that the grossest musical comedy or what…. The plot? It’s that plot, you know, nice girl from the right side of the tracks falls for Bad Boy from the wrong side of the tracks, they run into Complications and more complications, there’s lots of absolutely terrific dancing and singing and everything comes out perfect at the end, that plot.
The problems? There’s gotta be problems. One: we are all sick of shows about the fifties or revivals of the fifties. Two: James Snyder as Cry-Baby has been directed by the usually very savvy Mark Brokaw to be really a nice guy in spite of everything that’s happened to him. Wrong. He and the show would be ferociously better if he were sly, tough and a conniver. Now, he’s Mack the Butter knife. He needs to be a send up of the Big Mac the Knife. Then all will be glorious. As things are they are pretty damned good, certainly better than a lot of shows running. No finger pointing.
Marquis Theater, 1535 Broadway at 46th St. Mon-Sat 8 pm, Mats Wed,Sat 2 pm. Tickets: $39.50-$111.50. 212-307-4100.
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