Jason Robert Brown

2003-03-28
Newsday
Linda Winer

Lookin’ for love in all the wrong places? You have plenty of company on Broadway, where a gold-digger’s taste and a lack of imagination keep luring producers to almost certain heartbreak in the warehouse of old Hollywood hits.

Clearly, lessons were not learned from the last misbegotten musical liaison with a John Travolta vehicle, “Saturday Night Fever.” Now we have “Urban Cowboy: The Musical,” which opened last night at the Broadhurst Theatre with more sexual energy from the mechanical bull than from the romance between Bud and Sissy. He’s the lonesome cowboy who dreams of his own “little piece of dirt,” and she’s the earthy Houston wild thing (Debra Winger in the movie) with a romantic streak as wide as, you know, the great outdoors.

Bored yet? You bet. It is impossible to know what this adaptation of the 1980 film might have been if Aaron Latham’s co-author, Phillip Oesterman, had not died before getting to direct their long-aborning project. But it’s almost as hard to imagine that, given the schlocky story, the cornball dialogue and the ragtag collection of vintage and ersatz country-western songs, life at Gilley’s roadhouse would have turned out appreciably better.

This is the sort of plot in which somebody coughs in the first act and you know there will be a funeral in the second. The blue-collar men and women – Texas versions of hard-hats from “The Full Monty” and the stockboys in “Saturday Night Fever” – need to let loose with singing and dancing and sexing around at night. This time, yee-ha, there is a subtext about the noxious dangers at the oil refinery, but nothing is serious enough to bum out the pleasures of really tight blue jeans.

Lonny Price, best known recently for his staging of “A Class Act,” seems an odd choice to replace Oesterman as director of rodeo lust. Except for Sally Mayes as Bud’s Aunt Corene and Leo Burmester as Uncle Bob, there isn’t much call for class acts here.

Jason Robert Brown, who won a Tony Award for his score for the extremely serious “Parade,” injects a surprising amount of down-home joy as part-time composer of functional country laments and full-time pianist- music director with the terrific onstage band.

The band, on a hyperactive platform, is one of the best things that moves on James Noone’s set, which has a catwalk for the factory and amusing slide photos of trailer decor. Ellis Tillman’s costumes include lots of cowboy hats above plenty of self-conscious beefcake and dancing belly buttons. The monotonous choreography, by Melinda Roy, late of the New York City Ballet, fixes on the friction from hips grinding together.

Then there is Matt Cavenaugh, who is probably a perfectly nice young man. Unfortunately, his Bud has no charisma and less charm – a deficit that shows in a character who is a fidelity moralist who likes three- way sex. Far better is Jenn Colella, who suggests the contradictions that struggle in a woman who likes outlaws but believes “once in a lifetime, you can look deep in someone’s eyes and you know.” We suspect Colella will get another career chance to try in this lifetime.

Marcus Chait works up a good, mean sweat as Wes, the escaped convict who operates more than the mechanical bull, and Jodi Stevens does what she can as the poor-little-rich girl who wandered in from the set of “Dallas.”

The score goes a step beneath Broadway’s current trend of pre-existing hits. Instead of creating an entire show with recycled ABBA or Billy Joel, this one throws together a couple of songs from the movie, including “Lookin’ for Love,” with a bunch of similar readymades by Clint Black and others, as well as the half-dozen new ones by Brown.

Latham, who turned his Esquire article into the movie and a novelization, may have worn out the appeal of a hero who likes brandin’ cattle, eatin’ prairie oysters and “workin’ real hard to buy me my little piece of dirt.”

The little type in the back of the program credits a brand of “official boots” and a “preferred gym,” and thanks – (“Have a Bud, Bud”) – a beer company. One of Brown’s songs boasts “It don’t get better than this.” Call us cockeyed optimists, but we think it just might.

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