January 16, 2015
Time
Richard Zoglin

“Opening in January.” They’re the three most depressing words in movies — a telltale sign that the lame action film or Jennifer Lopez thriller you’re being touted is a sorry leftover, dumped by the studio in the fallow month following the big holiday releases. It’s not much different on Broadway, where big shows tend to close, not open, during the most low-trafficked month of the year. Two recent openings, however, are making this January a happy exception.

Honeymoon in Vegas, a long-aborning musical that opened last night at the Nederlander Theater, is based on the 1992 Andrew Bergman movie about a marriage-phobic guy who takes his fiancee to Vegas to tie the knot, only to see her fall into the clutches of a lovelorn gambler. With a book by Bergman himself and songs by the prolific Jason Robert Brown, it makes the screen-to-stage transition better than a lot of recent musicals (like last season’s Bridges of Madison County, which Brown also scored). The show is splashy and fun, and I’m betting it’s a hit.

Fans of the movie, it must be said, will notice a few deficiencies. As the nervous bachelor Jack Singer, Rob McClure (so wonderful in the title role of the musical Chaplin) settles for generic Broadway spunk, a far cry from the frantic angst that Nicolas Cage brought to the movie role. And the show’s biggest star, Tony Danza, is just a TV-bland smoothie as the gambler, with none of James Caan’s intriguing mix of menace and vulnerability on the big screen.

But hey, this is a Broadway musical, where production ingenuity, not character subtlety, is the coin of the realm. And by that measure, Honeymoon in Vegas is in the chips.

The story, for one thing, has more heft and coherence than most musical-comedies. Jack’s resistance to marriage stems from a promise to his dying mother (Nancy Opel), who pops up throughout the show, amusingly, as a nagging dybbuk. Then, just when Jack is about to break the curse and get Betsy (Brynn O’Malley) into a Vegas wedding chapel, he loses $58,000 in a poker game to the gambler — who offers to forgive the debt in exchange for a weekend with the girlfriend.

Director Gary Griffin (Broadway’s The Color Purple) takes all this seriously enough that the slick, Vegas-style production numbers don’t render the moral dilemma meaningless. Brown, one of the new generation of theatrical songwriters indebted to Stephen Sondheim, here seems to be channeling Jerry Herman instead, with bright, listener-friendly tunes full of big-band sizzle and lounge-show steam.

And then there are the flying Elvises. In the film’s most famous scene, Jack hitches a ride back to Vegas with a band of skydiving Elvis impersonators and parachute-jumps to Betsy’s rescue. The pompadoured Elvii — dressed in gold spangled leisure suits, grunting in unison — are a real hoot, and the skydiving sequence is done with such witty, low-tech stagecraft that it instantly earns a spot (along with “The Telephone Hour” from Bye Bye Birdie, and Susan Stroman’s walker-tapping grannies in The Producers) on my list of Broadway’s great comic production numbers.

 Nothing could be further from the splashy Honeymoon in Vegasthan the spare, mystical, two-character play Constellations, which also opened this week in a Manhattan Theater Club production. But if the first is an affirmation of the pleasures of old-fashioned Broadway professionalism, the second is heartening proof that Broadway can still, occasionally, find a place for serious and challenging new work, too.


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