TT: Wrong turn at Albuquerque

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I pan two New York shows, Little Miss Sunshine and The Jacksonian, the first with regret and the second with rage. Here’s an excerpt.
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The arrival in New York of “Little Miss Sunshine,” a musical version of the 2006 hit indie flick about an unhappy family from Albuquerque that takes an 800-mile road trip to enroll its youngest member in a children’s beauty pageant, teaches a salutary lesson: No matter how good you are, you can still write a bad show. William Finn and James Lapine, the co-creators of “Little Miss Sunshine,” are gifted and experienced without limit. They last collaborated on “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” one of the two best musicals of the past decade. Yet “Little Miss Sunshine” is a dud, one whose flaws appear in the cold light of hindsight to be blindingly self-evident. What were they thinking? Perhaps one day they’ll tell us, but for now all we can do is wonder….
The film moves fast. Everything is shown, scarcely anything told. In a musical, by contrast, the score exists to exteriorize and explain the emotions of the characters. Not only does this slow the action down to a crawl, but Mr. Finn’s songs are sentimental, in most cases stickily so: “I can’t be blind/That you sometimes gave and took at will/But you left behind/Some shoes that I have yet to fill.” Nothing could be further removed from the tart wit of Michael Arndt’s apple-crisp screenplay….
Beth Henley wrote one really good play, “Crimes of the Heart,” in which she apparently said everything she had to say. That didn’t stop her from writing 14 more plays. “The Jacksonian,” her latest effort, is a total disaster, a suppuratingly ripe hunk of semi-autobiographical Southern Gothic sex-racism-and-murder extravagance whose point of view is summed up by the first stage direction: “The action of the play takes place at the Jacksonian Motel, an establishment on the outskirts of Jackson, Mississippi. The motel exists as a haunting memory, a sort of purgatory that was Jackson, Mississippi, circa 1964.” Purgatory–got that? Need I add that Ms. Henley was born and raised in Jackson but now lives in California?…
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Read the whole thing here.
I also take note in today’s column of the off-Broadway remounting of Bedlam’s extraordinary four-person productions of Hamlet and George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, which will run in rotating repertory at the Lynn Fontanne Theatre through Feb. 2 and which I recommend very strongly.
For more information, go here.