Lysistrata Jones at the Walter Kerr Theater
Retellings of the old tales often work just because they aren’t yours. With something that’s been proven to work—such as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet—you can mess around with the characters, storyline, and setting without worrying that you’re setting yourself up to fail (a fact of life Laurents, Bernstein, and Sondheim took advantage of with their hit West Side Story). It’s almost a guarantee that you’ll attract viewers solely based on the following the old story has accrued. That’s the same reason you can’t list many musicals on Broadway today that aren’t taken from a tale from long (or not so long) ago: think Billy Elliot, Mary Poppins, The Addams Family, War Horse, and especially Godspell. This must be the reason why writing team Douglas Carter Beane (Sister Act) and Lewis Flinn (The Little Dog Laughed) thought they could succeed with their new musical Lysistrata Jones, based on Aristophanes’s age-old tale of women withholding sex as a means of controlling their disobedient men. Sadly, they were mistaken.
Lysistrata Jones is unspeakably average. Every action performed on the stage screams maximum effort, minimum result. While I do pity Beane and Flinn for coming close to what legitimately could have been a good show, I’m not inclined to accept something as mundane as this basketball farce. It wasn’t that it was bad, but that it wasn’t the opposite either. Jones is the kind of show where you leave the theater indecisive, because it hasn’t given you anything to be excited about.
And there’s another fault. Jones has no pull. There’s no massive, noticeable feature like Daniel Radcliffe in How to Succeed or even a composer descending into a previously unvisited realm that has become newly interesting to the composer’s fans, as was the case with Stephen Schwartz and his passion project Wicked. Even the concept of the show is wholly uninteresting. Taking the pacifistic attitudes of the original Lysistrata’s women and reapplying their anger to a college basketball losing streak is forced and unrealistic. If anything it makes the heroine seem utterly controlling, a puppeteer in the wings so desperate for glory she’ll instill a school-wide dry spell just to see some personal victory. As if this wasn’t enough, “Lyssie J” installs herself immediately as cheerleading captain, a position that isn’t exactly home to many protagonists in fiction or non. The result is that both Lyssie and the show are entirely unlikeable, and even song-ending high notes every now and again or an Aretha-like narrator with a toga and feather boa can bring the audience’s attention past the initial disinterest.
A show’s greatest enemy is clichés, and Jones is chock-full of the kind of oversights that would make a playwright wince in his seat. The dumb blonde who leads the pack away from conformation and into the light of self-acceptance (Legally Blonde, Clueless, House Bunny), the suave basketball captain whose belief in his solid relationship causes him all kinds of trouble (High School Musical, Pleasantville, Teen Wolf), and of course, the nerd-gets-the-girl theme that for some reason tends to hang out around feel-good comedies like a mosquito at your Fourth of July picnic (I hope I don’t have to name anything for this one). There’s no shortage of original moments, either, but they’re far out-weighed by painful and grossly self-referential mentions of Siri, the iPhone, SparkNotes, and enough other odd little “techie” outbursts to make one wonder if Beane and Flinn wrote the show as a response to “those darn kids with their machines!”
I won’t lie, there were one or two places where I laughed. During a scene in the basketball locker room when the team, the vast majority of which is white, address each other as if at a meeting of the Crips, the team’s only African-American member complains, “Guys, I am the only black man here! Why are you talking this way?” But I didn’t love. I didn’t feel the Broadway in the air (not surprising, since the show was produced originally in a gym and does its best to make the stage look like one too). People pay hundreds of dollars to see a Broadway show, and if it’s not good enough, I’m going to tell you it’s not good enough. And Lyssie and her team are not good enough for me. Sorry, Lysistrata, but hopefully your writers will live to “Fight! Fight! Fight!” another day.
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