Musical adaptation of film SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED from Nick Blaemire and Ryan Miller (Guster) to premiere at BAM — Page 2

Saw this over the weekend. Absolutely hated it. Production is a complete mess. Represents pretty much everything about "new musical theatre" that I just can't stand, which is unfortunate because I like Nick Blaemire, Lee Sunday Evans, and Duster - and the movie! The show is way overscored with songs that awkwardly sit somewhere between musical theatre and pop rock. The sound mixing in the space is atrocious - very live acoustics!

All around - very dumb, very disappointing. Antithetical to what's special about the movie.

The (good?) news for anyone who scores a cheap ticket is now they appear to have closed off their balcony due to extremely poor ticket sales and virtually the entire prime orchestra is unsold for all upcoming performances, so everyone who goes will score a prime seat at box office pickup. How can this stay open? Also, why wouldn't they pick better casting? The only person I know is Taylor Trensch and the rest of the people I never heard of.

Just learned that my performance, Saturday's matinee, has been canceled.

I saw it this afternoon and found the material quite charming. I really enjoyed Trensch and Obi-Melekwe. However, it’s all undercut by the direction. The stage itself is too large for this show and there’s never any sense of space or location. chrishuyen and raddersons nailed it there. It really needed some Dear Evan Hansen-like lighting to define the space more. Songs end awkwardly or people randomly sing with the band and then have to get off a platform. There’s so much air between songs and transitions. There’s an FBI subplot that’s rendered completely silly simply because of their costumes. Stagehands are on stage nearly as much as the cast, moving tiny set pieces around on a cavernous stage. And it sounds like they’re in a train station.

Which is all a shame, because I think there might be something there with a little more work on the supporting characters (we really don’t need to spend as much time with Jeff as we do). And I did end up having a nice afternoon. Maybe if I could go back in time, I’d hire someone else.

absolutely stunned and shocked by a positive review.

Sara Holdren's review echos a lot of how I felt:

"Despite several winning performances and a very big heart, the show feels sketchlike — not in the sense of SNL, but in the sense of an idea still being worked out. I’m convinced that this quality of patchiness doesn’t actually derive from an unfinished concept but from a disparity between content and container. At the big, beautiful BAM Harvey Theater, Safety Not Guaranteed feels like it’s in the wrong box. If this were a Fringe show, I kept thinking, I’d probably be completely charmed. There’s something about the Harvey’s scale and atmosphere — the peeling proscenium, the shades of Lev Dodin, Thomas Ostermeier, and Peter Brook — that seems to have stranded Safety’s director, Lee Sunday Evans, and scenic designer, Krit Robinson, somewhere between scrappy minimalism and bigger, slicker musical-theater impulses."

Vulture review

New York Stage Review

SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED: NOR IS A SATISFYING TIME

By Michael Sommers

★★☆☆☆ An intriguing-sounding sci-fi musical romance, disappointingly realized

https://nystagereview.com/2024/10/03/safety-not-guaranteed-nor-is-a-satisfying-time/

………? Huh?

Yeah, this didn't need to be retooled. It needed to be sent to licensing then out to pasture...

Theatremania gives the Signature Theatre production a positive review - "heartfelt and often hilarious"

Updated On: 3/16/26 at 01:05 PM