I'm glad I was able to catch this before it closed. It wasn't very good, but it was not good in so many ways, which I always find fascinating, particularly in how you can see the shape of something really terrific hidden under all the everything else.
The best parts were Colton Ryan and the score. Ryan was just totally captivating to me, he completely owned the role and I loved how much seemed to be going on inside him whenever he was onstage. He managed to reflect the darker side of De Niro's performance in the film while buoying it up with the show's lighter treatment, and making the connection between the two works feel almost natural. The score, of course, is lovely, and a great reminder of the absolutely massive talent of Kander and Ebb.
The problem with the score, and the rest of the show, is that there's way too much of everything, and it's all so mawkish. While I can accept that they would discard Scorsese's original vision of a dark, toxic relationship juxtaposed with the syrupy theatricality of classic musicals, I can't accept the unironic, unreflective cartoon world they put on stage. I'd go so far as to say the writing in this show was insulting.
Form-wise, it was an endless parade of missed opportunities and baffling, unnecessary inclusions. I try to enjoy shows for what they're clearly trying to be, but there were so many moments in this where I thought, why? There are so many examples of missed opportunities, but one that stands out to me is how they sing A Major Chord on the street outside of the bar where Jimmy was just playing piano. But now that they're on the street, he has no piano, so they have to mime playing the piano. It's like if the dance-off in West Side Story took place outside of the gym, after the dance.
The unnecessary inclusions contribute to this, because it means that everything has to be hustled offstage every five minutes to physically make room for one of the sub/side plots, or just to Do A New York Thing. The scene of snow falling in Central Park is broken up so Francine can throw Jimmy out of her apartment and everyone can come out on the fire escapes, because Dats Da Big Apple, Baybee! Now get off the stage, we need another scene of the violinist and the mom! That's enough of that, here comes the (insultingly vaguely) gay Puerto Rican guy and the woman who...makes dresses? Or something? Wait, we have to do the park bench pose from Manhattan! Move, move!
What really ground me down was the hokey flatness of the characters. The loveable news-stand guy, the overworked talent agent, the smarmy Broadway producer (with one of the most predictable heel turns I've ever seen), etc etc. They're archetypes that would work as clowns in a Cirque production, but here they just crowd out the story. The fact that all of this is done with absolute sincerity is what fascinated me, because it's all completely unbelievable hokum of the kind I didn't know still existed.
That plus the jittery pacing demanded by the sheer volume of content means that the songs are rarely able to be born organically from the action. The times that they are are thrilling (Sorry I Asked was particularly good), but then there are all the unmotivated songs that just fall flat for various reasons, like My Own Music, or the two Emily Skinner songs. Even the title song comes across as little more than an obligation. When Liza sings it in the film, it's a release of the traumatic hell she's been through, but the journey the stage version of the same character goes on is so trite that the song is robbed of its cathartic power. It just becomes That Song.
I think that sums up this whole show. In the middle of all the nonsense, there's something that could be great, but the inauthenticity of the whole thing was impossible to ignore. I'm glad I saw it, because it was fascinating, but I don't think this show could've worked without a massive rewrite.
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