Knights of Broadway

Broadway Musical and Top Forty Music Analysis by William S. Deaver

Archives for December 2016

School of Rock

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Andrew Lloyd-Webber has had it rough these last twenty years, with five clear failures in a row (six if you count that idiotic idea of adding original songs to a revival of The Wizard of Oz), but as a longtime supporter and devotee, I always argued that he could get himself back on top with the right idea. After all, the problem with all of those shows was the concepts rather than the music, which for the most part ranged from decent to excellent. Whatever the snobs may try to pretend, Webber is a genius-level composer, and I argued that all he needed was a good property to work his magic on. Well, he found it in a 2003 Jack Black film vehicle that was practically begging to be musicalized, and he now has a show so impressive that even those who despise him have to acknowledge the fact that he’s back on top.

This show is sort of a modern, Rock’n’Roll version of The Music Man, complete with the fraud who ultimately makes good, the organizing of a children’s band, and even a Marian-like strict academic enforcer who ultimately has her heart melted by the hero. But apart from the changes in setting, time period and music, this show is rather like if The Music Man had focused of Harold’s relationship with Winthrop rather than Marian, as apart from the lead, the most important characters are the kids, and the show is really about their bond with this unlikely mentor (in fact, the love plot isn’t even introduced until well into Act Two).

The main character, Dewey Finn, thus bears a certain vague resemblance to Will Schuester from Glee, at least in terms of his role in the plot, but drunken, illiterate slob though he is, the show makes the positive influence he’s supposed to have on the kids’ lives far more convincing than Glee ever came close to doing. He starts out making a bad impression on both characters and audience, but by the end he has become an immensely sympathetic figure and a genuine force for good…all through the Power of Rock.

The original movie was enjoyable enough, but the stage version is actually much more satisfying, and ironically, much of that has to do with the absence of the star for whom the film was written, Jack Black. Don’t get me wrong…Black is a brilliant comedian and a surprisingly good singer, and he could probably play this part in his sleep. But that’s kind of the problem…Black had been playing this same character for so long, first in Tenacious D and then in earlier movies like High Fidelity, that there really wasn’t much freshness or creativity left in it by the time School of Rock came around.  And while the stage Dewey is still very much a Jack Black type, his stage portrayers have to actually figure out who the character is instead of just going through the motions.

Moreover, because Jack Black had been playing this exact character since the beginning of his career, when we first meet his Dewey we already know everything there is to know about him. Whereas, as I stated, in the stage show he initially comes off as an obnoxious and irresponsible jerk, only for us to gradually realize what a good person he’s capable of being as teaching the kids brings out the best in him. None of this is possible in the movie, where every potential nuance of the character is immediately conveyed by the shorthand of Black’s trademark persona.

I’m sure you’re wondering about the score, since it was Lloyd-Webber’s actual contribution, and I’ll say this much…Webber may have looked ridiculous in the metal poses he adopted for some of this show’s promotional photos, but even at 67, the man has proved he can sure as Hell write convincing Metal (granted, it’s Eighties-style Metal, not the ultra-extreme fare that dominates the genre today, but it’s still pretty damned impressive). It couldn’t have been easy to walk the line of making songs that rocked out convincingly but still sounded natural being sung by kids, and he pulled it off beautifully.

More typical of Webber’s style is the prim, precise classical music used to contrast the fussy school faculty from Dewey, or the gently plaintive “If Only You Would Listen” for the children, which sounds rather reminiscent of the songs for the kids in Whistle Down the Wind. And while, as I said, the romantic subplot with the school’s principal is almost an afterthought, the song that sums it up, the gorgeous ballad “Where Did the Rock Go?”, is so moving that it’s really all this plot thread needed.

The show’s only flaw is the character of Patty, the harpy-like girlfriend of Dewey’s roommate and the show’s one clear antagonist. She’s a one-note, one-dimensional villain with no real motivation beyond pure spite, but after the show was smart enough to drop her horribly mean-spirited villain song, “Give Up Your Dreams”, she became a fairly minor character, a sort of living plot device, which helped neutralize the show’s only real problem. This is definitely a feel-good show…with the exception of that one character, everyone in the show is ultimately sympathetic and well-intentioned, even if they need a wake-up call to realize it.

And while Alex Brightman is phenomenal as Dewey and seems poised to be the next big Broadway star, the real stars of the cast are the kids, who play their own instruments and do so better than many famous Heavy Metal musicians. Webber is back on top, my friends, and as a longtime supporter, I couldn’t be more thrilled to see it. The snobs can say whatever they like…they said the same things about Verdi and Puccini back in the day, after all…but that doesn’t change the fact that Andrew Lloyd Webber is a musical and theatrical genius. Even though a few people still seem to be in denial about it, Webber has already been vindicated by history, and now that his late-career slump has ended with a triumphant comeback, only the extremely stupid would try to question his achievements at this point.

“I Don’t Wanna Live Forever (Fifty Shades Darker)” by Taylor Swift and Zayn

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Taylor Swift has had some writing credits on other people’s songs in the recent past, most notably “This Is What You Came For” by Calvin Harris and “Better Man” by Little Big Town, but this is the first new song she’s actually sung on since the release of the 1989 bonus tracks. Yes, it’s a single written for the soundtrack of a reprehensibly terrible movie, but so were Christina Perri’s “A Thousand Years” and Bruno Mars’ “It Will Rain”, to name just two fairly recent examples, so it’s clear even bad movies can have outstanding soundtrack items. To tell the truth, former One Direction member Zayn Malik sings more of this song than his more famous duet partner (displaying some of his most beautiful falsetto singing to date, I might add), but Swift was the one who wrote this song, which is the really important thing. It’s a gorgeous piece, darker and more sensual than most of Swift’s earlier work yet still clearly building on the innovations of her last album. Granted, we’ve had more than our share of songs about toxic relationships in the past couple of years (“Closer” by the Chainsmokers in particular helped wear out the genre’s welcome), but Swift basically started that trend with her 1989 songs like “Blank Space”, “Style”, and “Out of the Woods”, so that gives her a certain license to continue writing them, especially since she does it better than pretty much anyone else. And I give her credit…much more so than The Weeknd or Ellie Goulding on the first Fifty Shades soundtrack, she seems to grasp that there is nothing romantic or healthy about the relationship portrayed in the film. Granted, I’m not sure the filmmakers themselves know that, but Swift certainly does, and this song of twisted, co-dependent obsession almost qualifies as a kind of stealth deconstruction of the franchise. In any case, this is easily the best song to come from a Fifty Shades soundtrack to date, and it only makes my anticipation for the next Taylor Swift album even more wild than it already was.

Big Fish

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Chronologically, this was the first of the beautiful flops of the 2013-2014 season to close down, and it might well be the best of all of them. The critics pretty much lifted their leg on this show, but audience word of mouth was almost unanimously glowing…every non-critic that went to the show seemed to love it.

Now, being embraced by audiences in spite of critical scorn can be a good thing (as in Phantom of the Opera or pretty much every other Webber, Schonberg, or Wildhorn show of the Eighties and Nineties), or a bad one (as in such then-recent embarrassments as the Young Frankenstein, The Addams Family, or Spider-Man musicals). Still, I generally trust the general Broadway audiences much more than I trust our current crop of newspaper critics, so I was expecting something pretty good going in. Still, I was not really prepared for the actual experience in store. This is seriously one of the most beautiful pieces of theater I’ve ever seen in my life.

For those who haven’t seen the show, it’s about a young man whose father (played in a titanic performance by Broadway giant Norbert Leo Butz) has, ever since childhood, been telling him these elaborate, wildly imaginative tall tales. The son, as an adult, has kind of distanced himself from those stories and wonders if he really knows his dad at all underneath the layers of what he perceives as artifice. As the story begins, the son, recently married, finds out he’s going have a son, just as his father discovers he’s dying of cancer. The two awkwardly try to reconcile while they still have the chance.

If that sounds dreary, it isn’t. Most of the first act consists of the Father’s tall tales being acted out. First, he meets a witch, who tells him his future, including how he’s supposedly going to die. Then he is taught about the nature of love (and how to swim) by a mermaid whom he frees from a curse with a kiss. Then he meets a giant named Karl who becomes his best friend, and they leave his small hometown and his high school sweetheart to travel the open road. He meets the love of his life (who is, or course, the son’s mother) at an audition for a travelling circus, and works three years for no pay to find out her name so he can find her again. He finally finds her (having traveled to Auburn University human-cannonball style), and wins her over in a number called “Daffodils”, where, at the climax, the projection screen showing the field of daffodils gives way, revealing an actual huge arrangement of hundreds of daffodils.

That scene was the show’s visual highpoint, but the staging and visuals are gorgeous throughout, and the music is just heartrendingly beautiful. It may be slightly less accessible than Lippa’s previous efforts, but it still features a wealth of melody, and the lyrics are a huge improvement on his earlier efforts as a lyricist. There are admittedly a few lesser numbers here and there…the out-of-place Pop number for the Witch, the wince-inducing comedy number “Closer To Her”, the cheesy Western-themed production number “Showdown”. But the score is full of wonderful things like the thrilling opening “Be the Hero”; the gorgeous romantic ballads “Time Stops” and “Daffodils”; the moving “Fight the Dragons”; the heartbreakingly beautiful “I Don’t Need a Roof”; and the mega-showstopper “Red, White and True”.

During the second act, the son tries to delve into his father’s ‘real’ past, even suspecting him of having an affair, but ultimately finds out about the truly heroic deeds his father had done and that some of the tall tales weren’t as far from reality as they seemed. The show’s ending is one of the most devastating in Broadway history, moving from the magnificent final song “How It Ends” to the funeral, at which the son meets ‘Carl’, the ‘giant’ who was his father’s best friend and whom he had previously believed to be fictional, to a final tableau of the son telling similar stories to his own son. In short, this is one of those endings that keeps one-upping itself, keeps making you think you’ve reached the emotional climax, and then keeps getting more moving and more beautiful and more devastating.

The most heartbreaking thing of all is that the show closed in a matter of months because, as much as audiences love it, the critics hated it, and without a pre-sold title like Lippa’s last show, the vastly inferior The Addams Family, it just didn’t seem to be able to overcome that. It may have just been to beautiful and special for its own good…it was a very earnest, serious show, and its one minor flaw, the lack of effective humor in the book, only reinforced that quality. For all its glories, it really is the kind of show that generally becomes a beloved flop rather than a commercial success, so it probably doesn’t come as too much of a surprise that that’s what happened.

Thankfully, the music was preserved on a superb cast recording, but the show’s undeserved failure still stands as one of modern Broadway’s biggest disappointments. I seriously have yet to hear of anyone who wasn’t a New York newspaper critic not liking this show, so if the cast album is all that’s left of it, that’s still well worth acquiring. The Wild Party is still probably Lippa’s best score, but this is a very, very close second.

“Hallelujah” by Pentatonix

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I have a very high opinion of Pentatonix…they’re a vocal ensemble comparable in quality to the cast of Glee, only this one doesn’t come attached to an ineptly-written television franchise. They really do have beautiful voices, and their harmonies are some of the best heard from a Pop group since the days of the Brian Wilson-era Beach Boys. Some people, perhaps understandably, resented this cover for charting above Leonard Cohen’s original version in the wake of his passing, but it seems a bit harsh to blame Pentatonix for that fact. Like the Glee cast, their covers of contemporary Pop songs frequently surpass the original singers’ versions, but it’s probably understandable that they didn’t manage that feat with this song. And this really is one of the most beautifully sung covers of this song ever recorded, and given how often this particular song is covered, that title does not lack for competition. The vocals are simply breathtaking, and if this rendition does not really pay as much attention to the lyrics as it might have, it at least struck a correct tone of melancholy and anguish instead of trying to make it sound uplifting like so many covers. Granted, Cohen’s version managed to do both at once, but he was, after all, Leonard Cohen, and it isn’t really fair to fault this cover for not matching the depth of his original. And to be honest, in terms of sheer sensual musical beauty, this is actually prettier than even the Cohen version. Pentatonix, for some reason, only seem to chart when they release their Christmas singles, and this is easily the best of those singles to date…and even if a lot of that it thanks to the superior source material, they still do a more than respectable job of interpreting it.

Verdict: Good.

“Don’t Wanna Know” by Maroon 5 and Kendrick Lamar

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This song is mostly notorious right now for having one of those idiotic novelty music videos that are trying to go viral no matter what the cost to their dignity. But I tend as a rule to ignore music videos when I review popular songs, and frankly, even leaving that aspect aside, there’s more than enough wrong with the song itself. This song’s melody is catchy, I’ll give it that, but it’s also maddeningly repetitive even by the standards of the current year’s Pop music. And it’s not repetitive in an artistic, minimalist way like much of Future’s output, but in a formulaic Pop earworm way, a la “The Macarena”, an effect accented by the dull Trap beat in the background, which does not match the perky vocal melody at all. On top of that, the subject matter (a rather pathetic breakup song about desperate denial and drowning your sorrows in alcohol) is completely at odds with the brainlessly upbeat sound of the music. Again, this can work if done right, but there’s no real attempt at irony here…just a complete disconnect between the music and the actual topic. And Kendrick Lamar’s subpar guest verse doesn’t help. Don’t get me wrong, Kendrick is a genius on his own albums, but on his guest verses, he’s a kind of stylistic chameleon…his trademark talent is a gift for blending in perfectly with the styles of the main artists he’s appearing with. When he’s working with someone talented, this is usually a blessing (e.g. Pusha T’s “Nosetalgia”), but it means that when he appears on a bad artist’s song, he usually gets dragged down to their level. It’s been true since “Fuckin’ Problems” in 2013, and it’s certainly true here. In fact, this is probably the worst song Kendrick’s ever appeared on, and I certainly hope it stays that way.

Holiday Inn (Stage Version)

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When it was announced that they were mounting a Broadway musical based on the classic Bing Crosby-Fred Astaire movie vehicle, everyone but me seemed pretty optimistic. This is presumably because everyone else had forgotten about the mediocre and pointless stage adaptation of its later sister film, White Christmas, that flopped on Broadway eight years earlier. Well, in a development that should have surprised no-one, this unnecessary stage adaptation of a classic musical movie fared little better than its predecessor (or the Gigi stage version, or the stage versions of Meet Me In St. Louis, or Singing In the Rain, or Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, or Hans Christian Anderson, or Swing Time, or Top Hat, or High Society, or…I could go on all night).

The book was praised in the playbill notes as ‘fresh’ and ‘new’, but it’s actually utter hackwork. The plot somehow manages to be less credible and logical than the original film (which, let’s remember, was made in the 1930s, when standards for musical scripts were much lower than they are today). Worse, the unfunny dialogue is so predictable and cliched that the audience can see every punchline coming long before it arrives. Granted, the original movie’s script was no great work of literature either, but at least it entertained. Here, the space between the musical numbers is simply dead weight.

The Irving Berlin songs are, of course, all wonderful, but most of them are already familiar to everyone in the audience, and most of those people have presumably heard them performed better than they are here. Bryce Pinkham is a wonderful musical actor, as A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder proved irrefutably, but he’s simply not a good enough pure singer to play a Bing Crosby part…at least one where Crosby’s glorious voice is actually a plot point. Pinkham’s thin tenor just doesn’t sound like it could melt a woman’s heart through sheer vocal beauty alone, and the role explicitly requires no less. And thanks to the terrible writing, he and his love interest come off as humorless drips in all their dialogue scenes, which makes it hard to like or care about them.

His co-star, High School Musical alumnus Corbin Bleu, is a wonderful dancer, but he isn’t really right for this character. Holiday Inn gave Fred Astaire a rare chance to play a caddish, deceitful, almost villainous character, but because he was, well, Fred Astaire, he still came off as irresistibly charming. Bleu just makes the character seem like a manipulative, treacherous, girlfriend-stealing creep. And as good a dancer as Bleu is, he simply can’t convey character through dance alone the way Fred Astaire could. Granted, neither can anybody else, but I’d argue that’s a good reason not to try to duplicate this film onstage. It doesn’t help that his onstage vis-a-vis is Megan Sikora, who plays Lila as another one of those obnoxiously shrill comic caricatures that are showing up far too often on Broadway lately. I understand it in something like Bullets Over Broadway, but why here? Lila certainly wasn’t like this in the film, and it doesn’t really fit in well with her role in the story.

The choreography is admittedly excellent…the only times the show comes to life are during the dance numbers. But it feels frankly wasted on a project like this. Why couldn’t this fine choreography have been done for an original show, or at least a more interesting recycled one than this, where the rest of the material was actually up to its level? If you really love a good production number and want to go see this show for the dancing alone, I suppose I’d understand. But I think you ought to know that everything, including the dancing, is better in the original film, which can be viewed for a fraction of the cost of a Broadway ticket. I’d really recommend you seek that out rather than waste your time with this pointless glorified cosplay. Apparently they intend to turn this production into another one of those Broadway livestreams, which means there will actually be two movie versions of this property. But this fact does nothing but highlight how utterly redundant the very existence of this adaptation was from the very beginning.

Tuck Everlasting

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We’ve had a surprisingly large number of what Ken Mandelbaum used to call “Heartbreaker Flops” in the past few Broadway seasons…shows that fail, but for one reason or another still qualify as glorious in their ambition and achievements. After Big Fish, If/Then, Rocky, Bullets Over Broadway, The Bridges of Madison County, Honeymoon in Vegas, Bright Star, and Shuffle Along, came the last of the current crop to debut, Tuck Everlasting. Based on Natalie Babbitt’s beautifully-written young adults’ novel, this gentle, strikingly different show tells the story of a family that accidentally gains eternal life by drinking from a magic spring, and a young girl’s life-changing encounter with them.

You know how I observed, when I reviewed Lestat, that it apparently saw itself as some high meditation on the torment of immortal existence? Well, here’s a show that actually pulls off that idea a billion times better than Lestat ever dreamed of doing (even if both shows wound up as flops). Every plausible reaction to the idea of living forever is represented by one of the members of the family…the father, Angus, who is tormented by the heavy weight of time; the mother, Mae, who tries to make the best of her situation as much as she can; and older son Miles, who is anguished by the loss of his long-dead wife and son. The only one of them who seems to enjoy his situation is youngest son Jesse, and even he seems desperately lonely under his callow facade.

Winnie Foster, the sheltered eleven-year-old girl who comes into contact with the family, has a kind of suggested love plot with Jesse, but it’s all kept well within the bounds of the kind of relationship a seventeen-year-old can have with an eleven-year-old in a wholesome family show like this (especially if said seventeen-year-old is technically 104). Jesse does consider the possibility of marrying Winnie when she grows up, though, and this leads to the show’s central dilemma…namely, is life really worth anything without death? It’s an idea that’s been brought up many times, and even musicalized before, as any good Queen fan knows. But the novel this show is based on was always one of the most eloquent of the theme’s many reiterations, and the musical preserves that eloquence in adaptation.

The intensely lyrical score is responsible for much of that eloquence, and it is for the most part exquisite. The music is drawn largely from Country and Soft Rock influences, but it not only never feels anachronistic (the show takes place in the late 1800s), but does a breathtakingly beautiful job of expressing the show’s gentle and tender feelings. And if the lyrics do occasionally descend into cliche, they are still extremely effective is communicating the show’s themes, and their poetic language compliments the music perfectly. The adorable “Good Girl Winnie Foster”, the tempting “Seventeen”, the heartbreaking “Time”, the show’s key philosophical number “The Wheel”, Winnie’s contemplation of her loaded choice “Everlasting”, and the music for the final ballet are particularly wonderful.

Given all this, why did the show fail? Well, it does have one large artistic problem: as exquisite as it is when it focuses on Winnie and the Tuck family, it falters whenever it turns its attention to the villain (known only as “The Man in the Yellow Suit”), or the pair of buffoonish lawmen who serve as the show’s excuse for comedy relief. True, Terrence Mann is certainly the biggest name in the cast, and he does give an entertainingly hammy performance as The Man in the Yellow Suit. But these parts of the story don’t seem to have inspired the authors…the portions of the book and score that deal with them, including the cheesy villain song “Everything’s Golden” and the groan-inducing comedy duet “You Can’t Trust a Man”, are far less accomplished than the parts of the show that focus on Winnie and the Tucks. And the hyperactive overproduction of Mann’s carnival-themed production numbers does not remotely match the delicate tone of the rest of the show.

That said, I really thinks Broadway was just not ready for a show this different from what it was used to. This show is really more unusual than the above description may make it sound. The score is very oddly structured: there are really only twelve full vocal songs in the entire score. The rest consists of reprises and little musical fragments clocking at less than a minute each, and the actual climax of the story is told entirely through ballet. The same sheer refreshing sense of difference that won the show its small but devoted fanbase was just too much for mainstream Broadway, at least in a small, starless, low-key show with no overwhelming box-office draw like this one. But even with only thirteen tracks out of twenty-four being of real interest, and two of those being comparative duds, this show’s cast album is still well worth picking up. The good songs more than make up for the abundant filler, and the performers, particularly Sarah Charles Lewis as Winnie and Andrew Keenan-Bolger as Jesse, do a wonderful job with them. I hope we haven’t seen the last of this fascinating little show, because it just seems too interesting and unique to simply disappear into the mists of time.

Violet

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This poignant musical fable, an early effort by Broadway composing superstar Jeanine Tesori, took seventeen years to make the leap to Broadway and even then didn’t find the success it deserved.

Set in the 1960s, it tells the story of a young woman disfigured by an accident who makes a journey to a faith healer she believes can fix her face. On the way, she falls in with two soldiers, one black and one white, both of whom wind up falling in love with her in different ways. When she meets the faith healer, he turns out to be a pathetic fraud, but she finds comfort in the arms of the more sensitive of the two soldiers, named Flick, and the curtains falls on a bittersweet but intensely happy and hopeful ending.

Because the show was based on a short story, the plot is rather thin in terms of actual event, but the show is full of very intense feelings: the heroine’s symbolic confrontation with the spirit of her dead father and the heartrending final scene are among the most moving moments in modern musical theater, and the show’s journey from blind hope through despair to tentative happiness is one of the most moving stories to be found in any musical.

These powerful emotions are conveyed largely through the show’s melodious and intensely moving score. The score is still arguably Tesori’s best, with its only logical competitor being Fun Home, and ranks as one of the most underrated theater scores of the Nineties. Employing the Country and Classic Rock idioms that grew naturally out of the setting, it features two of the decade’s most rhapsodic ballads, “Lay Down Your Head” and “Bring Me To Light”, and two of its most inspiring anthems, “Let It Sing” and “On My Way”.

There are two intense musical confrontation scenes, “Hard To Say Goodbye” for Violet and Flick and a sequence consisting of the anguished “Look At Me” and the tender “That’s What I Could Do” for Violet and her late father. “You’re Different” is one of the deepest and most insightful character songs you’ll ever hear, as Monty, the callow womanizer of the two soldiers, privately admits just how much Violet has managed to get under his skin (one of the few flaws in the Broadway revival was the decision to replace this song with the far less interesting “Last Time I Came to Memphis”).

To lighten the heavy emotions of the piece, there are the clever “Luck of the Draw” for Violet’s father in a flashback and the sparkling “All To Pieces”, where Violet imagines all the features of famous movie stars she’d like to ask the faith healer for. And this is a rare show that manages to save its best song for its final curtain…the aforementioned “Bring Me To Light”, which is quite seriously one of the greatest final curtain numbers of all time, and does a perfect job of capturing the tentative love and joy that ends the show’s story.

You may ask, if the show has all these good qualities, why every one of its production in a major venue has failed. I can’t say for certain, but if I were to hazard a guess, I’d say it had something to do with the thinness of the plot. Remember, the show is based on a short story, and for all the sheer emotional punch it packs, there simply isn’t enough happening in this plot to fill two hours of theater. Don’t underestimate how fatal this problem can be…a number of otherwise wonderful musicals (most famously The Baker’s Wife) have been consigned to perennial failure by a lack of sheer plot.

This show seems like it would be a natural for local productions, given its modest set demands and overall simplicity, but it has one difficulty: the title role is extremely challenging, because nearly all productions of the show choose not to use a cosmetic scar for the character. The actress has to convey the impression of being scarred, through her bearing and her reactions to the world, which means the show essentially cannot be done without a superb actress in the lead.

But with its incredibly moving story and largely glorious score, the show deserves far more success than it has received, and I can only hope its short-lived Broadway mounting will at least draw enough attention to it to lead to more productions. After all, the phenomenon of the Broadway flop that becomes a sensation in local theaters is a reality now (9 to 5, 13), and this seems like exactly the kind of show that would do well in that market, even if it is a bit hard to cast.

In any case, this is one of those cult flops scores that should be mandatory listening for serious theater fans. The original Off-Broadway cast album with Lauren Ward is probably the best overall recording, though I know most modern Broadway fans will probably gravitate to the Broadway cast album with Sutton Foster because of name recognition. Either way, this is a score well worth hearing, all the more now that Fun Home has made Tesori one of the biggest names on Broadway. The last two Broadway seasons have given us more than our share of genuine Heartbreaker Flops (Big Fish, The Bridges of Madison County, Rocky the Musical, If/Then, Honeymoon in Vegas, Bright Star, Shuffle Along, Tuck Everlasting), but this is something special even by those standards, and if you’re serious about Broadway, you owe it to yourself to check this one out.