Archives for April 5, 2013

In today’s Wall Street Journal I have nothing very good to say about two new Broadway shows, Lucky Guy and Kinky Boots. Here’s an excerpt.
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If you lived in New York in the Nineties, you might remember Mike McAlary, a tabloid columnist who mostly wrote about the police and their activities. Back then he was something of a local celebrity, but today scarcely anybody not employed by a newspaper has heard of him, even though he won a Pulitzer Prize and published four books prior to his death in 1998.
So…would you pay a hundred bucks to see a Broadway play about McAlary? Especially if it wasn’t any good?
The answer to this question is necessarily complicated by the fact that “Lucky Guy” stars Tom Hanks and was written by Nora Ephron, who died last year. But it’s still slack and amateurish, and unless you have an all-consuming interest in what the newspaper business was like at the tail end of the 20th century, it’s hard to see how “Lucky Guy” comes anywhere near passing the who-cares test.
The working title of “Lucky Guy” was “Stories About McAlary,” which goes a long way toward explaining what went wrong with the final product. McAlary was the kind of by-any-means-necessary reporter who dragged his self-made legend behind him like a U-Haul, and Ms. Ephron has glued a dozen or so juicy anecdotes together in chronological order, unfortunately neglecting to dramatize them. Her characters spend more time talking to the audience than they do to each other, and everything they say is obvious…
In “Kinky Boots,” Harvey Fierstein and Cyndi Lauper have concocted an imitation heart-warming British working-class musical with a gay angle and a maudlin finale. It is, I suppose, progress of a sort that we need no longer import such phony shows–we can now make them ourselves….
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Read the whole thing here.

“What a loathsome sub-species dramatic critics are.”
P.G. Wodehouse, letter to Denis Mackaill, July 2, 1957