TT: Just add Waters

Two raves in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, one on Broadway (Cry-Baby) and one out of town (Paper Mill Playhouse’s Kiss Me, Kate). Yay! Here’s an excerpt.
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You want funny? I’ll give you funny, or at least tell you where to find it: “Cry-Baby,” the new John Waters musical, is campy, cynical, totally insincere and fabulously well crafted. And funny. Madly, outrageously funny. It is, in fact, the funniest new musical since “Avenue Q,” give or take “The Drowsy Chaperone.” If laughter is the best medicine, then “Cry-Baby” is the whole damn drugstore.
Like the 1990 film on which it is based, “Cry-Baby” is a teen-musical spoof in which the standard bad-boy-meets-nice-girl plot is put through the shredder and turned into a zany spoof of buttoned-down ’50s conformism…..
This way lies trouble, for nothing in musical comedy is harder to bring off than a pure parody, since it deliberately omits the magic ingredient that makes most successful musicals run forever, which is sentiment. An unfelt musical is by definition emotionally hollow at the core, and so it lives or dies on the strength of its wit. If it isn’t brilliant but merely clever, it loses steam and limps past the finish line. That’s the great thing about “Cry-Baby”: It never goes limp. Broadway debutants David Javerbaum (the executive producer of “The Daily Show”) and Adam Schlesinger (the bassist of the brainy rock band Fountains of Wayne) have written an unbroken string of super-smart pop-music genre send-ups that are both unexpectedly hummable and full of neat rhymes…
Cole Porter launched his career by writing old-fashioned musicals with tissue-thin plots and immortal songs, and lived just long enough to see the coming of shows whose books were dramatically sound–and to write one himself. “Kiss Me, Kate,” the musical version of “The Taming of the Shrew” that Porter wrote in 1948 in collaboration with Sam and Bella Spewack, is one of the three or four best Broadway musicals of the “Oklahoma!” era, a masterpiece of tunefulness and charm. It doesn’t get performed nearly often enough, though, so I urge you to head out to New Jersey to see Paper Mill Playhouse’s new revival, which couldn’t be more satisfying….
James Brennan, who directed Paper Mill’s superb 2004 production of “She Loves Me,” has done even better by “Kiss Me, Kate,” working closely with Patti Colombo, whose dance numbers are seamlessly interwoven with the dialogue scenes. Ms. Colombo is one of the most imaginative musical-comedy choreographers around–her staging of “Too Darn Hot” stopped the show–and I can’t see why Broadway hasn’t snapped her up.
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Read the whole thing here.