Remember
when comedienne Rita Rudner was hip?
Seemed hip? Relevant? Struck you as funny?
If Rinse,
Repeat is the fooler that has the outward
trappings of vanity production but an inner integrity by which it earns its
keep, Ms. Rudner’s woeful musical, Two’s a Crowd, is the textbook, poster child example of Vanity Production
Classic. It's about two middle-aged misfits—a sophisticated suburban
woman
determined to have an adventure in the wake of an unfaithful husband’s
abandonment (Ms Rudner); and a red-state, blue-collar
widower (Robert Yacko)—who
find themselves and each other in Las Vegas. Other roles are played variously
by Brian Lohmann
and Kelly Holden Bashar.
Having no plot other than the inevitable
meet-cute-hostile then warm-to-each-other romance, the narrative is flabby and
without a ticking clock of suspense, the jokes are as inevitable as the
trajectory, and you get the feeling that you can actually tell when Ms. Rudner ran out of steam as a dramatist, because she
suddenly defaults to interpolated monologue to cover the narrative distance
between scenes, heading toward the endgame, that it appears she didn’t know how
to write.
Happily, Ms. Rudner didn’t choose to write
the songs as well as the book, but she did, alas, walk through one of the other
common vanity doors, and corralled a pop-record guy with no theatre cred, Jason Feddy,
to do the honors, which he does as both writer and shaggy performer, randomly
stepping away from the elevated musical ensemble, of which he is a part, to
alternately join in and offer commentary. Predictably, the songs are often
self-referential and deliver familiar aphorisms with a winky
abandon under the delusion that doing so makes them fresh (the final number,
for example, sung as the moral of the story, is “Shit Happens”).
Martin
Bergman’s direction isn’t quite
as flabby as the script, but only because the hotel-room set is so constricting
and specific that there’s not much room for heavily egregious staging. But the
technique is notably lacking sharpness (among other things, he often neglects
to stage a simple, clean button to end a given number).
To say more is to beat the thing to death, and it
doesn’t quite deserve bludgeoning;
it’s too giddily naïve to be dull, at least. But it’s an objectively tepid and
clueless attempt at a musical that doesn’t deserve your patronage either.
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