TT: Recycling bin

In today’s Wall Street Journal I wrap up the current Broadway season with reviews of Nice Work if You Can Get It, Leap of Faith, and Don’t Dress for Dinner. My verdicts are mostly mixed. Here’s an excerpt.
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Your grandmother is coming to New York for her annual visit. You want to take her to a nice, safe Broadway show, and the two of you saw “Anything Goes” last year. What to do? Simple: Head for “Nice Work if You Can Get It,” a jukebox musical in which Kathleen Marshall endeavors to make lightning strike twice, this time with songs by George and Ira Gershwin instead of Cole Porter. While it’s not nearly as good as its predecessor, it’s also not entirely bad. The songs are classic, the dances are dynamite, and everybody loves Kelli O’Hara. So what if the book is relentlessly unamusing and the acting rigidly derivative? You can’t win ’em all, right?
Like “Anything Goes,” “Nice Work” is built inside the husk of an ancient Broadway musical. Joe DiPietro, who wrote the book, has used “Oh, Kay!” as the skeleton for a meta-musical, a brand-new period piece in which the plot of “Arthur” (a rich, likable drunk is forced by his family to propose to the wrong girl, then meets the right one) is transplanted to the Roaring Twenties, tricked out with an assortment of other stock devices and festooned with no less than 21 Gershwin tunes, all but two of which are lifted from other shows. Even the performances are recycled: Ms. O’Hara does Mary Martin, Jennifer Laura Thompson does Madeline Kahn, Michael McGrath does Buddy Hackett, Chris Sullivan does Andy Devine, and Matthew Broderick does Matthew Broderick.
Would that Mr. DiPietro had stolen a few good jokes while he was at it, since “Nice Work” is devoid of them. Fortunately, Ms. O’Hara is her usual sweet self…
“Leap of Faith,” the musical version of the 1992 film in which Steve Martin played a crooked evangelist who has a crisis of faithlessness, is as slick as ice on Teflon. To be sure, Raúl Esparza, the hard-working star, is smooth in the wrong way–he comes across like a talk-show host, not a sequin-spangled faith healer–and none of the other members of the immensely likable cast give the impression of having traveled much farther west than Chelsea. But if you’re looking for pure Broadway razzmatazz, “Leap of Faith” delivers the goods. Robin Wagner’s set turns the interior of the St. James Theatre into a revival tent, and Christopher Ashley and Sergio Trujillo, the director and choreographer, put every square inch of it to effective use. The chorus rocks and rolls. The gospel-style songs, by Alan Menken and Glenn Slater, are rousingly lively (though the ballads, as usual with Mr. Menken, sound like ’70s sitcom themes).
What “Leap of Faith” lacks are sweat and heart, the absence of which will only be bothersome if you permit yourself to imagine how this well-oiled applause machine might have run had its creators taken the plot seriously….
Were I ever to teach a course in how to stage farce, I’d show a video of the Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of “Don’t Dress for Dinner” so that my students would know what not to do. Written by Marc Camoletti, the author of “Boeing-Boeing,” the seven-door farce mounted to diverting effect by the Roundabout four years ago, “Don’t Dress for Dinner” is a comparably complicated comedy about a pair of married philanderers (Adam James and Patricia Kalember), the people with whom they cheat (Jennifer Tilly and Ben Daniels), and a French cook of the utmost avariciousness (Spencer Kayden, who was so good in “Urinetown”). When done well, it’s a hoot, but John Tillinger, the director, has made the amateurish mistake of encouraging his actors to troll aggressively for laughs instead of letting the situation generate them….
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Read the whole thing here.