Not to kick a show right before it's taken off life support, but this was an absolutely bizarre misfire. I have to admit that I'm not at all familiar with the TV show, and I'd kind of hoped that that would make it more appealing, because a lot of the criticism seemed to revolve around the changes that were made. The fact that it's advertised as a "comedy about a musical" also lurked at the back of my mind.
Unfortunately, I don't think there was any salvaging this without massive rewrites, which is ironic given the plot. The bones of a decent farce are in there somewhere, but Bob Martin's book is just an endless string of tired sitcom jokes and it was kind of hard to watch this cast trying to soup them up into something palatable. Ivy's business with the witchy method acting coach would've been old hat thirty years ago, so why is she the show's primary antagonist? This is the kind of material that turns up in a late-season Will & Grace b-plot.
The songs being almost completely unintegrated was also a huge mistake. It's not that they're all diagetic rehearsal/production numbers, but that they have almost no bearing at all on the plot of the show or the state of mind of the characters. If they'd been reshaped to more clearly reflect the action, it would make sense in a Cabaret/Kiss Me Kate way, but the connections are tenuous at best. Outside of the fact that they're mostly pretty good songs, there's no compelling reason to pay attention to them because they're not saying much.
One thing this show helped me appreciate is the degree to which Shaiman and Wittman were clearly hamstrung by Smash's score when writing Some Like It Hot. They'd already pumped out almost 40 Marilyn-adjacent songs for the TV show, and hearing the Smash score in the theatre it was impossible to deny that these are far superior to what they wrote for SLIH. The lyrics are tighter, funnier, and there's remarkably little of the syllabic torturing that plagues their worst work.
Let Me Be Your Star gets sung multiple times so of course it sticks in your ear, but Don't Say Yes was terrific (and not just because of the gyrating hunks of man meat), and I really loved the mounting, menacing chaos during 20th Century Fox Mambo - that whole sequence could've carried on for another ten minutes and I would've been happy. They Just Keep Moving The Line is also probably the closest the show comes to successfully synchronizing a song to the plot itself.
I will admit to laughing a lot during the diarrhea muffin sequence ("Ivy's in Utica and Karen's EXPLODING" got me) but three Marilyns is ridiculous. I was almost hoping there would eventually be like twelve Marilyns running around or something, but Chloe doesn't even want the part and she barely has an impact on the plot.
Just a bizarre experience. I liked the matzo ball joke, though.
