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February 4, 2005
TT: Beach blanket bungle
I didn't enjoy myself at the theater last week, and my weekly drama column for The Wall Street Journal, in which two newly opened shows catch several kinds of hell, reflects that fact with alarming clarity.First under the lash is Good Vibrations:
Harpo Marx described the famously awful, extremely popular "Abie's Irish Rose" as "no worse than a bad cold." Judged by that yardstick, "Good Vibrations," the new Beach Boys musical that opened Wednesday at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre, is more like a stroke--one that leaves you capable of movement but knocks 15 points off your IQ. By the time I finally staggered up the aisle, I found it hard to remember that there was once a time when even the most blatantly commercial musicals were put together with a modicum of intelligence and craftsmanship....
I'm not saying there's nothing good about "Good Vibrations." I liked the tall, cheery-looking blonde in the blue top, for instance. But outside of the dogged professionalism of the hard-working cast, there's precious little else to admire outside of the undeniable fact that it never pretends to be anything other than a big dumb applause machine. Somehow I can't see paying $100 a seat for a musical that's unpretentiously horrible.
No less unpleasing was Brooklyn Boy:
Donald Margulies, who won a Pulitzer Prize for "Dinner With Friends," has now written a play about a struggling young Brooklyn author who writes a best-seller about his unhappy youth and promptly discovers that all that glitters is not gold. Excuse the cliché, please: "Brooklyn Boy," the Manhattan Theatre Club's latest offering, is nothing but. It's as if Mr. Margulies had spent a week poring over Gustave Flaubert's Dictionary of Accepted Ideas before sitting down to write his latest opus...
I suppose it's possible for a playwright to write a good play about a writer, but the temptation to sink into a nice warm bath of self-serving self-indulgence is apparently too great for ordinary mortals to overcome. Harold Ross knew this so well that he turned it into an iron rule for contributors to the New Yorker: "Nobody gives a damn about a writer or his problems except another writer." Too bad nobody told Mr. Margulies.
No link, so to partake of the rest of the carnage, buy a copy of today's Journal, or (even better) get modern and go here.
Posted February 4, 2005 12:01 PM
