2003-03-28
New York Times
Ben Brantley
Willkommen, pardner. And come on in to this here little den of iniquity called Gilley’s. It’s Texas’s own answer to that trashy Kit Kat Club from ”Cabaret” and a place that proves that lewd and lascivious behavior doesn’t have to have a German accent.
At Gilley’s, as it’s represented in the new musical ”Urban Cowboy,” decadence may not be divine, but you can’t say it’s not American. It’s the kind of honky-tonk where you lead with your pelvis and where the language is strictly double-entendres, Western style (ride ’em, cowboy!). Guys and gals introduce themselves to each other after they’ve had sex. And, hey, both the women and the men show lots of cleavage. Bet you can’t find all that in Berlin.
That, more or less, is the implicit pitch behind ”Urban Cowboy: The Musical,” which opened last night at the Broadhurst Theater in a conclusive demonstration that it’s possible to be vulgar and bland at the same time. Based on the 1980 movie that starred John Travolta and Debra Winger, ”Urban Cowboy” does indeed suggest ”Cabaret” by way of Branson, Mo. And it makes you long for the quiet good taste of shows like ”The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.”
Broadway disaster cultists may be disappointed to learn that ”Urban Cowboy,” directed with a hand of lead by Lonny Price, does not eclipse the now departed ”Dance of the Vampires” as the season’s worst musical. Featuring a rote book by Aaron Latham and Phillip Oesterman and a patchwork of new and recycled country-and-western songs, ”Urban Cowboy” doesn’t have the imagination to be so extravagantly bad.
Instead, it exudes the mechanical air of a show dutifully assembled according to a low and specific assessment of audience expectations. The jokes are sub-sitcom. The songs are mostly delivered in a shiny, anonymous twang that might be heard in a Texas-themed pavilion in Disney World. And the young, bottom-twitching ensemble members, attractive in a ”Baywatch” sort of way, have little in the way of personalities to call their own. Unlike the recent stage version of ”The Graduate,” which also turned a saucy, widely loved film into something devoid of flavor, ”Urban Cowboy” has on its creative team someone who worked on the original movie.
That’s Mr. Latham, who wrote the screenplay with the director James Bridges as well as the nonfiction article in Esquire magazine that inspired it.
Yet in translating the movie into the frothier idiom of song and dance, ”Urban Cowboy” doesn’t so much trade on fond memories of the film as squelch them. Within the screen version, as Vincent Canby pointed out in The New York Times two decades ago, there was a formulaic B-movie lurking close to the surface. But who wanted to look past the surface when you had Mr. Travolta and Ms. Winger, in their hormonal primes, generating such sultry chemistry?
If the New Jersey-minted Mr. Travolta, playing a rustic Texan in the skyscraper wonderland of Houston, didn’t really seem to the cattle ranch born, he was grounded by a host of authentic-seeming, juicy performances from Scott Glenn, Barry Corbin and Brooke Alderson, among others. (For the record, I saw the show at the Broadhurst with Ms. Alderson, who restricted her responses to the occasional snort.)
What’s more, Bridges’ mise-en-scène pulsed with vividly observed details of Southern blue-collar life. Made just as the sexual revolution of the 1960’s and 70’s was burning itself out, the movie now reads like a nostalgic farewell to the age of promiscuity. The song most associated with the movie, ”Lookin’ for Love,” was a paean to settling down after sleeping around.
In the Broadway incarnation, this sensibility is turned into a case for having your beefcake and cheesecake and forsaking it, too. Here, the callow young farm boy Bud (the chiseled-bodied newcomer Matt Cavenaugh) no sooner arrives from the country than he stumbles into Gilley’s, where he scores with not one but two ladies at once. (Now why does ”Cabaret” keep coming to mind?)
Shortly thereafter, he meets the hoydenish, misnamed Sissy (Jenn Colella), with whom he promptly adjourns to alfresco sex. ”I just love doin’ it in the back of a pickup, don’t you?” says Sissy. (Pickup trucks, by the way, also turn out to be a source of fondly remembered sex for Bud’s elderly aunt and uncle, Corene and Bob, played by Sally Mayes and Leo Burmester.)
Then, faster than a greenhorn can fall off a horse, Bud and Sissy get married, get jealous and split to go off with inappropriate new partners: a rich, smug golden girl named Pam (Jodi Stevens) and a mean escaped convict, Wes (Marcus Chait).
In the meantime, the lovable Uncle Bob has developed an ominous cough, so you can safely predict there’ll be a funeral as well as a wedding. And Jesse (Rozz Morehead), the good-time hostess at Gilley’s, has brought a mechanical bull into the bar, creating the opportunity for a thrills-free, suspense-free ride-off between Bud and Wes.
Except for the tameness of the mechanical bull and Bob’s cough, this is all according to the movie. But here the plot’s main raison d’être is to provide an occasion for the patrons at Gilley’s to strut and swivel in form-fitting jeans in a series of interchangeable production numbers in which blind drunkenness and Kama Sutra positions are simulated with down-home gusto.
Both James Noone’s chrome and neon set and Melinda Roy’s choreography bizarrely bring to mind the dance hall in ”Sweet Charity.” The dancing is a combination of gymnastic do-si-do-ing and Fosse-esque hip gyrations. There is even one brazen tableau in which the performers (male and female) pose with invitational menace like the sullen taxi dancers in Bob Fosse’s staging of ”Charity.”
The wholesome message seems to be that sex is really better with someone you love, but in the meantime there’s nothing wrong in getting a few kicks out of life. Correspondingly, the billboardlike dialogue veers between the crudely suggestive and the piously sentimental, between hearty raucousness and dime-store romance. (Pam to Bud: ”You don’t love me. You just looked at Sissy like she was wild horses. I want someone to look at me like that.”)
The score, which includes standards like ”Could I Have This Dance?” and, yes, ”Lookin’ for Love,” is orchestrated and arranged by Jason Robert Brown (the composer of ”Parade” and ”The Last Five Years”), who also wrote several of the show’s songs. As with the dialogue, the musical numbers swing between hoedown hedonism and misty-eyed treacle. The onstage band is good, evocatively producing those twanging chords of heartbreak and defiance that can make country pop hits so irresistible.
The performers, for the most part, fail to find an interpretive equivalent for the genuine emotions in the music. Mr. Cavenaugh and Ms. Colella, while both as cute as smile pockets, tend to deliver their songs and their lines at the same pitch, which is loud, assertive and nasal. Ms. Mayes and Mr. Burmester, both seasoned pros, do what they can with the standard-issue roles of feisty old love birds. Everyone else is, in a word, forgettable.
For all the insinuating talk and posturing onstage, ”Urban Cowboy” isn’t remotely sexy. The proverbial tired businessman is more likely to get a nap than titillation out of the show.
Rest assured, however, that at least one group should be pleased: the executives at Anheuser-Busch. Budweiser beer bottles, cases and pictures are seen throughout the show, and much is made of the happy coincidence of the names of the show’s hero and his favorite drink. ”This one’s for you, Bud,” says Pam, dedicating a song to the strapping cowboy. Who says Hollywood has the monopoly on product placement?
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