crybaby reviews?

[massofmen]

Posted: 11/18/07 at 5:07pm

i know its on the west coast..but when do they come out? I am interested.

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 11/18/07 at 5:27pm

Given the time difference, probably not for a few hours.

[massofmen]

Posted: 11/18/07 at 5:44pm

thanks

[DrTheatre]

Posted: 11/18/07 at 5:55pm

Will they really come out in a few hours? Which time is their "Opening Night" show, I assume it's the 7pm show and not the 2pm matinee, right? So, if any reviews come out it would most likely be after the 7pm curtain here in Ca. Which means the show ends say 9:30pm, that means reviews may come out around 12:30am or later, East Coast time.


People who are reviewing it from the East Coast, may come out earlier, but CA reviews usually take days to come out. But those who where there,I will assume they will post something on here.

Updated On: 11/18/07 at 05:55 PM

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 11/18/07 at 6:06pm

Here, they don't wait until the show is actually over. Reviews generally start coming out within an hour or so of the opening night curtain -- here in New York some are posted exactly at that time (which is usually an early curtain around 6:30).

I imagine Variety will be up no later than 10pm or so, EST. Not sure about the LA Times or the others though.

[neddyfrank2]

Posted: 11/18/07 at 6:28pm

There is a show today at 2 and Opening Night Curtain is 7.

Opening Night here isn't as big as it is over on your coast. There will be a party afterwards, but nothing much...

The major reviews usually will come out tonight (mainly Variety). SOMETIMES the LA Times will come out tonight but usually it will come out tomorrow or even for some shows a few days after. The rest of the reviews will come out tomorrow and the local reviews will come throughout the week since they are not invited during previews but during "Press Night" which is usually the Wednesday after opening.

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 11/19/07 at 9:57am

Sandiego.com is a Rave:

"Well, get out your wallet. Call 858 550-1010. Book your tickets for “Cry-Baby,” before it heads back east Dec. 16 to prepare for a spring Broadway opening.

Because, the Playhouse has done it again.

(Yes, this IS a review of the show. And no, I have never, in 49 years of play-reviewing, made such a bald-faced pitch. But I’m doing it now and I’m glad, Glad, GLAD!).........

.......Counting alternates, the cast numbers 28, at least six of whom are the ace dancers who help choreographer Rob Ashford put something new into everyone of the old chestnuts necessary in a show about Kids Back Then. I was particularly struck by the make-out scene but Ashford found freshness everywhere.

Scott Pask’s scenery achieves something similar in a decor that manages to be sardonic, tacky, mobile, specific and teasy pretty much all the time, aided indomitably by Howell Binkley’s perky lighting design.

Continuing the bountiful assets of the show, there are 14 musicians in the pit, including conductor-keyboardist-musical director-incidental composer-additional arranger Lynne Shankel, who moved everything right along. It’s a testament to her work, to the arrangements of Christopher Jahnke and the dance arrangements of David Chase – believe me! – that I don’t remember anything of the music except that it always worked.

Which leaves director Mark Brokaw, able to leap tall cliches with a single bound. Staging something like this can easily turn into a ritual but, like so much of the creative elements in this extraordinary effort, Brokaw’s staging always follows the path that refreshes."



http://www.sandiego.com/option,com_sdca/target,e6cab377-c2f9-49fa-8bba-0e050f906972/

Updated On: 11/19/07 at 09:57 AM

[Smaxie]

Posted: 11/19/07 at 10:41am

That's San Diego.com, not the Union Tribune. But the writer, Welton Jones, used to be the Union Tribune critic, so it's at least a pretty credible opinion.

Anne Marie Welsh is the current critic at the Union Tribune.

Updated On: 11/19/07 at 10:41 AM

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 11/19/07 at 10:59am

Sorry, I saw the name and assumed it was Union Tribune site. I've made the correction.

Updated On: 11/19/07 at 10:59 AM

[Smaxie]

Posted: 11/19/07 at 6:06pm

Here's the Variety review.


Cry-Baby

By BOB VERINI

No real tears are shed in "Cry-Baby," the exuberantly witty musical adaptation of John Waters' 1990 social satire in pre-Broadway tryout at the La Jolla Playhouse. That's because the style forbids anything quite so vulnerable. Employing '50s musical-comedy conventions to skewer conventional morality then and now, tuner offers laughs aplenty, powerhouse choreography and a sizzling rockabilly-and-blues-inspired score -- but it lacks a single sentimental bone in its body. While the show is never exactly mean, it's not warm either, and it will be interesting to see how auds take to a hilarious romp that rarely stops, or stoops, to touch them where they live.

Wryly ironic sensibility is derived partly from Waters but mostly from satirical newspaper the Onion and TV's "The Daily Show," on whose staffs co-songwriter David Javerbaum has been a mainstay. Structure echoes that of all those Elvis Presley musicals in which a swingin' outsider rocks Middle America; tonally, the tuner is closest to the Zucker brothers' laugh-a-minute Elvis spoof "Top Secret!"

Baltimore circa 1954 is the war zone for delinquent "Drapes" and conservative "Squares," with the first shots fired during the Women's Club's Anti-Polio Vaccination Picnic. Grande dame Mrs. Vernon-Williams (Harriet Harris) presides over strict segregation of the town's classes, at least until the red-jacketed Drapes barge in to advise a sea of pastel-clad Squares to "Watch Your Ass."

Enter Wade Walker (James Snyder), "the most popular loner in town," a doe-eyed greaser with James Dean's mien and Elvis' pelvis. Ironic nickname "Cry-Baby" alludes to the blockage of his lachrymal glands since his parents' long-ago execution as communist traitors. (The blitheness with which this Rosenbergs-tinged plot point is bandied about says as much about show's tone as anything else.)

He and the dowager's granddaughter, Allison (Elizabeth Stanley), fall in love at first sight -- don't stop to ask why they've never met before -- as events sweep the warring factions through a series of set pieces from hot-rockin' Turkey Point ("the riffraff Riviera") to Juvie Prison, where Cry-Baby is incarcerated on a trumped-up charge, to the Fourth of July finale at Star Spangled Funland.

In their first collaboration since "Hairspray," Mark O'Donnell and Thomas Meehan offer a genial book that amasses wordplay and non sequiturs in a way Gotham won't have seen since S.J. Perelman's "The Beauty Part." Libretto kids Cold War-era follies while looking forward confidently to a time when, as the finale puts it, "Nothing Bad's Ever Gonna Happen Again." (In the future, cast predicts, America will "give the gift of freedom to a people far away" and be presented with flowers and unicorns.) Like "Grease," show ends with the profession that all of us will go together, but "Cry-Baby" adds a distinct raised eyebrow of disbelief.

Pastichey songs by Javerbaum and Adam Schlesinger of alt-rock band Fountains of Wayne consistently invest show with early-rock-era rhythm, making it easy for choreographer Rob Ashford to knock our bobby sox off. Assigning aggressive athleticism to the Drapes while putting the Squares through more formal paces, he wittily turns group numbers into Jerome Robbins duking it out with Onna White -- an evocation of the musicals' Golden Age echoed by the symmetrical painted borders and flown flattage of Scott Pask's dreamily attractive sets.

Eschewing camp, helmer Mark Brokaw maintains a crisp pace and stylistic consistency at the price of full emotional involvement. Nothing comes of Allison's announcement that "I'm a good girl but I want to be bad" as she remains in high heels. Leads get not a single romantic ballad; their one slow tune, Wade's "Can I Kiss You," asks for tongue, not tenderness.

Snyder and Stanley are so likable that their lack of romantic chemistry -- she's somewhat too mature-looking for him, and their subtext drips "We're in lust" rather than true love -- may not bother auds. But show culminates in no rush of feeling for thwarted love reunited, and Cry-Baby's tears carry no weight when they finally materialize. It's all good fun, but never transformative.

Ensemble standouts include Harris, indispensably carrying off lengthy wrap-up exposition in a voice redolent of -- talk about channeling the 1950s -- Elizabeth Patterson, who played the babysitter Mrs. Trumbull on "I Love Lucy." And while he never seems to make a difference to the story, Chester Gregory II (another "Hairspray" vet) is spellbinding as a Little Richard clone.

Show's individual showstopper is Alli Mauzey as Lenora, a teen with a psychotic passion for Cry-Baby. She rocks the plaintive steel-guitar ballad "Screw Loose" -- think of Patsy Cline dropped on her head; later she soars in duet with Allison's would-be suitor, super-Square Baldwin (Christopher J. Hanke, earning more laughs than his stock character might otherwise warrant) on "All in My Head."

But the high point is the prison break, beginning with convicts' stamping out license plates with rhythmic menace (they're "A Little Upset") before exploding across Baltimore in light and silhouette. Ashford sends escapees and cops (as well as street signs) careening back and forth to beggar the legend of Robbins' fabled Keystone Kops number from "High Button Shoes."

Sentiment is still taboo, but the sequence taps into the thrilling emotionality traditionally associated with the tuners "Cry-Baby" has been constructed to subvert.

Variety - Cry Baby

Updated On: 11/19/07 at 06:06 PM

[Smaxie]

Posted: 11/19/07 at 6:13pm

Baltimore Sun review:

'Cry-Baby,' a mostly cheeky delight, needs tinkering

Central characters lack believability; show has 5 months until Broadway debut

By Mary Carole McCauley

Sun theater critic

4:50 PM EST, November 19, 2007

LA JOLLA, Calif.

"Cry-Baby" the musical is tantalizingly, teasingly, heartbreakingly close to success. That makes it all the more frustrating to see Success receding in the distance, marching out of Southern California in search of someplace else to settle down.

This new song-and-dance extravaganza, based on John Waters' cult classic film, made its rollicking world premiere Sunday night before a packed audience. Much about it works not just well, but brilliantly.

And the musical's creators -- some of the most talented folks in the business -- still have five months to tinker before the show opens on Broadway in April.

But there's one major thing wrong -- the two central characters -- and that's going to be tough to fix. Imbuing them with quirkiness, or even believability, will alter the very DNA of Waters' source material.

If Success doesn't take up permanent residence, at least it pays a brief visit.

The show's score, a mix of doo-wop and rockabilly, with nods to early Motown and rock-and-droll, is mostly a cheeky delight, though it takes until the fourth song, "I'm Infected," to really get going.

The script is hilarious. The book-writers, Thomas Meehan and Mark O'Donnell, have their tongues stuck so firmly in their cheeks, it's a wonder that pliable muscle doesn't accidentally poke through and lick their ears.

Sample line of dialogue: Before a group of high school students is to be inoculated against a potentially deadly disease, one Roland Park society matron proudly announces that the women's club has come out against polio "56 to 8."

Rob Ashford's choreography is characterized by witty physical jokes, and there's one rousing show-stopper: "A Little Upset." A dozen inmates, convicted of "Drapery in the first degree," attach yellow and black Maryland license plates, circa 1954, to their shoes and kick, back-flip and tap-dance their way to freedom.

The number is an obvious homage to "Stomp," the urban dance spectacular that uses matchbook covers, brooms and dustpan lids to create music. But the license plates make a sound peculiar to themselves: softer-edged than traditional tap, but just as gritty, not so much a slide as a scrape. The effect is quite thrilling.

"Cry-Baby" is a warped "Romeo and Juliet" tale set in Bawlamer in 1954. Wade "Cry-Baby" Walker is a Drape, a joy-riding juvenile delinquent who never sheds more than a single, picturesque tear. Allison Vernon-Williams is a member of the proudly conformist Squares, whose class values are slyly satirized in a song called "Squeaky Clean."

But the two kids have more in common than it first appears. Both are orphans: Cry-Baby's pacifist parents were framed for an arson and went to the electric chair. Allison's were killed in a freak croquet accident. Can true love be far behind?

Set designer Scott Pasek hit upon a clever visual metaphor to communicate these dual worlds. He frames the stage with a set of arches, that, when combined with the fourth line of the floor, forms a kind of square.

When the show inhabits the world of the Squares, the arches are, predictably, well, square. But, when the action shifts to the realm of the Drapes, the sides and top of the frame shift and tilt. Suddenly, the audience is looking at the stage at a slant. It is literally a shift in our perspective --with all the emotional connotations that implies -- and it is nothing short of inspired.

The supporting characters are eccentric marvels. Alli Mauzey, as the lovelorn Lenora, might not steal Cry-Baby's heart, but she nearly pilfers the show. In her twisted torch song, "Screw Loose," Mauzey has some moves with a microphone that would make a porn star blush.

Chester Gregory II channels his inner James Brown to considerable comic effect as Dupree, Cry-Baby's best friend. Gregory has a powerhouse of a voice that can hold a note for so long, that, well, he's probably still holding it as you read this.

It's also great fun to see Harriet Harris, as Allison's staid and proper grandmother, gradually become unhinged as she sings her confession, "I Did Something Wrong (Once)."

If only Cry-Baby and Allison had even a smidgen of idiosyncrasy.

That's not the fault of either James Snyder (Cry-Baby) or Elizabeth Stanley (Allison) who have sweet, true voices, charisma, and the loopy sensibility required by a Waters musical.

But, the main characters are underwritten. They are upstanding, noble, selfless, pure of heart and bo-ring. In fact, if Cry-Baby didn't wear a scarlet jacket and play an electric guitar, you'd swear he was a Square.

What make the supporting characters so rich are their ambivalences, flaws and internal contradictions. The plot development that allows the title character to be exonerated and his family honor cleared, which allows Romeo and Juliet to ride off into the sunset on a Harley, results not from Cry-Baby's own actions, but from another character's crisis of conscience and moral growth.

Because all of us in the audience also are full of ambivalences, flaws and internal contradictions, our sympathies flow to the characters in the show possessing the same traits. Allison and Cry-Baby may be the idealized, unobtainable objects of desire, but it's hard to care what happens to them.

In fact, I found myself rooting for Cry-Baby to go off with the undeniably psychotic, but fabulously interesting, Lenora. Maybe then Success would decide to hang around La Jolla, which is beautiful in the winter, instead of hitching a ride to parts unknown.

It's enough to make a callused critic shed a single, picturesque tear.



Baltimore Sun - Cry-Baby

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 11/19/07 at 6:17pm

The Baltimore Sun is Mostly Positive:

""Cry-Baby" the musical is tantalizingly, teasingly, heartbreakingly close to success. That makes it all the more frustrating to see Success receding in the distance, marching out of Southern California in search of someplace else to settle down.

This new song-and-dance extravaganza, based on John Waters' cult classic film, made its rollicking world premiere Sunday night before a packed audience. Much about it works not just well, but brilliantly.

And the musical's creators -- some of the most talented folks in the business -- still have five months to tinker before the show opens on Broadway in April.

But there's one major thing wrong -- the two central characters -- and that's going to be tough to fix. Imbuing them with quirkiness, or even believability, will alter the very DNA of Waters' source material.

If Success doesn't take up permanent residence, at least it pays a brief visit.

The show's score, a mix of doo-wop and rockabilly, with nods to early Motown and rock-and-droll, is mostly a cheeky delight, though it takes until the fourth song, "I'm Infected," to really get going.

The script is hilarious. The book-writers, Thomas Meehan and Mark O'Donnell, have their tongues stuck so firmly in their cheeks, it's a wonder that pliable muscle doesn't accidentally poke through and lick their ears..........


..........But, the main characters are underwritten. They are upstanding, noble, selfless, pure of heart and bo-ring. In fact, if Cry-Baby didn't wear a scarlet jacket and play an electric guitar, you'd swear he was a Square.

What make the supporting characters so rich are their ambivalences, flaws and internal contradictions. The plot development that allows the title character to be exonerated and his family honor cleared, which allows Romeo and Juliet to ride off into the sunset on a Harley, results not from Cry-Baby's own actions, but from another character's crisis of conscience and moral growth.

Because all of us in the audience also are full of ambivalences, flaws and internal contradictions, our sympathies flow to the characters in the show possessing the same traits. Allison and Cry-Baby may be the idealized, unobtainable objects of desire, but it's hard to care what happens to them."



http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/arts/bal-lifestyle-crybaby-1119,0,2625198.story

Updated On: 11/19/07 at 06:17 PM

[MotorTink]

Posted: 11/19/07 at 6:21pm

Looking good so far! I'm excited! I am so happy Chester is getting such raves.

[neddyfrank2]

Posted: 11/19/07 at 7:14pm

Would you consider Variety's review mixed-positive or just positive?



Updated On: 1/25/08 at 07:14 PM

[Smaxie]

Posted: 11/19/07 at 7:40pm

I'd call Variety positive. The opening paragraph of a Variety review always gives you the reviewer's general overall take on the show. I think Verini is endorsing the show, even while saying it lacks a warm emotional center.

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 11/19/07 at 7:44pm

I'd say all three, so far, are mostly positive. I hope the creative team takes some of the minor quibbles to heart -- it sounds like with a just a few tweaks here and there, they're awfully close to having a bona fide hit on their hands (it sounds like it'll certainly be a major Tony contender). I'm really looking forward to seeing this.

[neddyfrank2]

Posted: 11/19/07 at 7:49pm

It seems from the title that this guy hated it but I can't read the review.

http://www.sddt.com/News/article.cfm?SourceCode=20071119tza
Opening Night!

[BroadwayBaby6]

Posted: 11/19/07 at 8:22pm

As I have mentioned in a post elsewhere on the board, Thomas Meehan told me himself on Sunday that the show is still" a work in progress". I agree that the love story between the two leads needs to be developed further. There is no doubt in my mind that the show will only get better from now till its Broadway opening. Right now I'll give it an A- and I have no doubt it can become an A/A+ show with some tinkering.

The key review will be the one from the LA Times.....

[neddyfrank2]

Posted: 11/19/07 at 8:36pm

Updated On: 1/25/08 at 08:36 PM

[BroadwayBaby6]

Posted: 11/19/07 at 8:54pm

If I remember correctly, I was sitting in H18. This was at the Sunday matinee.

[neddyfrank2]

Posted: 11/19/07 at 9:00pm

Updated On: 1/25/08 at 09:00 PM

[BroadwayBaby6]

Posted: 11/19/07 at 9:07pm

Well, I was the only person in the theatre wearing a Broadway Cares t-shirt so I was kinda hard to miss. Are you San Diego based?

[neddyfrank2]

Posted: 11/19/07 at 9:09pm

Updated On: 1/25/08 at 09:09 PM

[BroadwayBaby6]

Posted: 11/19/07 at 9:26pm

Neddy,

I'm Orange County based but see a lot of stuff out in LA- although I do come down to see all the pre-Broadway shows in San Diego....(upcoming next in SD broadway bound shows is Dancing In The Dark, aka The Band Wagon directed by Gary Griffin).

[BroadwayBaby6]

Posted: 11/19/07 at 9:26pm

Neddy,

I'm Orange County based but see a lot of stuff out in LA- although I do come down to see all the pre-Broadway shows in San Diego....(upcoming next in SD broadway bound shows is Dancing In The Dark, aka The Band Wagon directed by Gary Griffin).