Musical adaptation of film SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED from Nick Blaemire and Ryan Miller (Guster) to premiere at BAM

Nkeki Obi-Melekwe and Taylor Trensch to Star

Exciting. We are hoping this is great too!

FYI, all preview balcony seats, September 17 through October 2, are $44.50, including fees.

This was being papered, I figured, why not? I’ll be there Sunday.

Been a long time since I disliked something as much as this tonight. I’m sorry, but there was absolutely nothing redeemable in it, for me. At two hours long, this was a loooooong evening for me.

I hope you like it. For me, it played like a project some middle schoolers wrote one day at a summer camp to put on for people that night.

I liked it. When I was scanned in, I was told that tonight was the first preview and that it was running 1:54 no intermission. I thought that it was fun and sweet with music and songs that I would listen to again. I do agree about not getting to know the characters (especially compared to the movie), and I didn't feel any emotional connection to the story (like I did with the movie). Talented, hard working cast and musicians. I think that it can get better as they work through previews.

I generally agree with all the other posters, though I didn't come out feeling quite as negative. The show isn't good but it's a bit inoffensive (and maybe that's because I had no familiarity with the movie so I was still a little invested for the plot) and it was worth it for the TDF price I paid.

I liked the *sound* of the score (though I do usually like a rock sound overall), but none of the songs really had melodies that would make any of them notable or memorable. And most of the songs are more of the "let's sing this song about the situation" style but don't actually do anything crucial for the plot (I'll give them credit though for having identified a lot of the right spots to add a song though). I think the closest a song came to functioning like a traditional musical theater song was maybe "Are You Good?" but honestly a lot of them blend together for me even when looking at the song list. And I wonder if they'd change this in previews, but so many songs ended without a button and you could feel the audience hesitate in trying to figure out whether to clap or not.

From just reading the plot summary of the movie on Wikipedia, it seems like the show follows that story fairly closely, but without interesting characters, and I really enjoyed seeing Nkeki Obi-Melekwe's performance, but Darius just didn't seem to have any personality traits--she seemed to oscillate between heartfelt and "lets just do it for ****s and giggles" so I never had a clear handle on her motivations or how much she really believed Kenneth. On the other hand, Jeff and Arnau seemed like more two dimensional stock characters (more so on the part of Jeff, but Pomme Koch was fantastic in the role). And while I could eventually see the pieces of how the themes among the different characters came together, it just felt like they were in different stories and I often found myself thinking "why do we care" whenever we went back to a Jeff or Arnau subplot. I felt like I could almost see the gaps where the movie may have done a better job of intertwining the different parts of the story.

Even with all the other problems, I think the show could've played better if it had stronger direction. I agree with raddersons that a lot of the visual elements seemed puzzling. They have the band on stage to just take up space they didn't know how to use, or at least that's how it seemed. Maybe it would've worked better in a smaller theater, but I think even just defining different spaces would've helped a bit, as the show seemed to be asking a lot of the audience in envisioning the different settings. I did think the opening was fairly strong, but almost immediately after that I could tell there were tonal issues as they couldn't decide what kind of story they wanted to be (the lead up to the finale played off as campy and there was an audience member near me who couldn't stop laughing at it). While there are "serious" threats in the story, you never know how you're supposed to take them because the show didn't set a strong tone to begin with, so the stakes are kind of all up in the air.

I could possibly be convinced to see this again if they really put in some work during previews, but ultimately this was a miss for me, which is rather disappointing as I like a lot of the people involved in it. I do also wonder about the recent trend of non-theater artists composing musical theater scores as they all (with the exception of Sara Bareilles) seem to miss the key points of what a theater score is supposed to do, but I suppose that's another topic entirely.

I was on the fence about purchasing tickets and then I was reminded that one of the authors wrote Glory Days, the horrific/boring Broadway musical that closed on opening night about 14 years ago... so that's a hard pass for me and based on what some other people have reported in this thread, I am very glad I am skipping this.

Agreeing with others -

This is pretty bad.

One thing I didn't read here before - Taylor has some of the worst songs ever written for a male lead. Ever! How they made it past the first rehearsal is a mystery.

The direction and production truly didn’t do the show itself any favors. Some directors can elevate mediocre material, but in this case it just made it that much more obvious. I was truly shocked how poor it was on those fronts.


As for the material, as others have said, it’s not great. I had a fine time, the music is nice, but what I could hear of the lyrics (which was admittedly not much), was not good. It’s a pity because it is a fun story and I wish it was done better.

More to come tomorrow, but I either saw a different show than most posters or they have done some work. The score and cast are amazing. Yes, the book and direction needs work, but I truly had fun. And was going in with low expectations tonight. It may never lift off further, but well worth the trip to BAM to see it.