Reviewed by David Spencer
Right off, I have to admit, camp humor, especially the
kind of pop-culture, romping, whoopee gay-sensibility that filmmaker John
Waters specializes
in, is simply not my brand of comic eccentricity. For sheer absurdity, I favor
Monty Python; for genre parody, I dig stuff like The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to
the Galaxy or
the BBC's current Hyperdrive or the classic Police Squad—for somewhat gentler, more
humanist eccentricity, my tastes favor Northern Exposure—and recently, a brilliant
Canadian series about a collective of young video game designers working for a
big corporation, called jPod. (That last is based on the novel by Douglas Coupland;
just canceled by the CBC—biiiig mistake—prompting a groundswell of "save jPod"
campaigning up
north. But its 13 episodes are still eminently downloadable, so if geographical
restrictions prevent you from seeing them on the CBC website, I urge you to
fire up your bit torrent application and get 'em. And now back to our regularly
scheduled review.)
So this musical based on the
tale about a bad boy biker guy Wade "Cry Baby" Walker (James
Snyder) with an
absurdly tragic backstory from which he gets his nickname, and the show its
title—would be unlikely to draw me in under any circumstances. (The story:
Cry-Baby’s parents—shades of the Rosenbergs—were framed and executed for
treason; he cried for them once, but never cried again; and Allison [Elizabeth
Stanley], the
too-good upper crust girl from the too-good side of the tracks, falls for him
to the consternation of polite society.) The question then becomes...how likely
is it to draw in a more receptive attendee?
Hard to say.
Taking it solely on its own
terms as a musical, it doesn't, craft-wise, do anything particularly wrong. The
libretto, by Thomas O'Donnell and Thomas Meehan would seem to faithfully reflect the general
outline and trademark indicia of the original film—close enough to give its
fans all the familiar things they'd demand, self-supporting enough to make
sense to one who has never seen it—and the score by Adam Schlesinger and David Javerbaum reflects the right pop-energies
from the proper characters to sing at the appropriate story points; more, the
songs are well-formed, the rhymes and scans nearly always perfect, elevating
the pop music tropes to an unusual level of literacy.
But by the same token, there
seems a kind of bloodlessness to all the efficiency. Cry-Baby lacks the heart of its unofficial
sister musical Hairspray, also based on a John Waters film, in part because the
enterprise feels mercenary—how genuine was the motivating passion? would it
have even been attempted if Hairspray had not demonstrated that the John Waters catalog
might be lucrative?—and in part because its story lacks the true nobility at
the heart of Hairspray's silliness: young, overweight heroine Tracy's desire to fight
bigotry of all kinds and improve society at large. (There's a vague flavor of
that in Cry-Baby, but
[a] it's substantially watered down, the social commentary limited to the tale
of a , class "outsider"; and [b] it's the same message—been there,
heard that sung.) And this is reflected in both the perfunctory crispness of
the libretto and a score whose music so familiarly reflects the song styles
being borrowed and sent up that, despite tongue-in-cheek lyrics, they never
shine with the imprimatur of originality, or even a filtering point of view
(save for one non-genre, Act Two character confessional for deft comedienne Harriet
Harris as the
heroine's understanding, rather youngish grandmother).
Too, Cry-Baby starts at such high octane, under
Mark Brokaw's
super-slick direction, with several relentless and relentlessly presented
numbers at the start that you don't get to spend any "bonding" time
with the characters; you just meet them long enough to clock their essences and
what they're about in broad strokes and wham! wham onto the next. Argue that all
they are are
broad stroke essences and I'll concede the point, but so are the characters in Forum
and Pippin among many others (including Hairspray). Those shows still give us time
to care.
So really, again, it's down to
how you feel about pop culture camp. If it's prone to rizzle your risibles, you
have a shot at a rousing good time. If it's the kind of thing that, on TV,
would make you hit the remote button in favor of the slyer satire of a Family
Guy rerun, or
the latest episode of NCIS, or Zimmern scarfing down more Bizarre Foods, or anything other than such smirky-smarmy
goings on, then the only reason to attend Cry-Baby live is being a musical theatre
completist, who has to see everything because it's your calling and passion to
do so.
But I wonder if even a diehard
adherent would leave this one at curtainfall believing it was necessary...