![]() This is clearly going to be a “don’t think too hard” affair. Okay, sure - for the moment, we roll with it. But at this point, the boys have “literally no more money” and they need a bigshot to take notice so that their dream can last for more than a single performance. Yes, this is “kind of” Broadway, says Bud, but we’re on “the ‘weird side’ of 7th Avenue,” and, actually, Bud and Doug have only been able to rent this theater for one night - thanks to the fact that Bud’s uncle died in a hang-gliding accident and left him some cash, and oh, also, Doug sold his parents’ house. Cue screeching brakes: But isn’t this Broadway? Here’s where this version of the show has to start doing a bit of gymnastics. (Though when it comes to the historical accuracy of their magnum opus, Bud and Doug are pretty much these guys, just nicer.) They are here, they explain to us, to do a reading of their show: They will play all the parts and sing all the songs, with the help of “Jersey’s premier wedding band - The Middlesex Six!” Bud clarifies sheepishly, “We could only afford three of them.” It’s okay, Bud! The three-piece band, up on stage with the actors and conducted by keyboardist Marco Paguia, is excellent, rendering the show musically expansive and, with a variety of well-timed bells and whistles, materially adding to its comedy.īud and Doug are hoping to attract the backing of a producer so that they can take their baby to Broadway. ![]() Gutenberg! follows Doug Simon and Bud Davenport (here played to the hilt by the reunited Book of Mormon duo, Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad), two stage-struck natives of Nutley, New Jersey, who have written a musical about the inventor of the printing press, Johannes Gutenberg. This time, though, the blow-out’s on a budget. (Blow-outs are kind of his thing: He also worked with King and Brown on Beetlejuice, and has taken on elephants and windmills in Moulin Rouge! and politically charged disco dance floors in Here Lies Love.) Alex Timbers came on board as director in 2006 and is back for the Broadway blow-out version. Over the next few years it was fleshed out into a full show that made a splash Off Broadway and in London with its cheerfully low-fi, joke-a-minute antics. It’s a tricky one: Gutenberg!, written by Anthony King and erstwhile New York theater critic Scott Brown, was originally developed as a 45-minute one-act with the Upright Citizens Brigade back in 2005. So, what happens when one of these stories actually lands in a Broadway theater? What happens when the impossible dream… comes true? That question hovers around Gutenberg! The Musical! before the show even gets underway, and it’s a question the production dances with but isn’t quite able to resolve. We love them because they’re going to build rockets out of cardboard and do their damndest to fly. We don’t love these characters because they’re going to become successful astronauts. These are stories about big, soft hearts full of ardent, impractical desire. ![]() Like the art it’s satirizing, it’s a genre that can sometimes feel a little dippy and indulgent, but at its best it’s both outrageously funny and strangely, sweetly sublime. ![]() (If you haven’t seen it, stop reading this review and come back to me in one hour and twenty-four minutes.) Waiting for Guffman, Christopher Guest’s peerless 1996 mockumentary, is perhaps the paragon of the form. It’s a safe space for group backrubs and vocal warmups that sound like abstract orgasms for scarves and berets and carrying copies of An Actor Prepares in your “I Can’t, I Have Rehearsal” tote bag for miniscule budgets, massive ambitions, enough earnestness to knock Oscar Wilde sideways and, most of all, for dreaming of Broadway. There’s a certain kind of theater parody made by theater people, where the characters are either provincial rubes or name-dropping, Olivier-quoting grandees of their local scene, and theater is made out to be a kind of small-town cult for the flamboyantly uncool. Stomp the presses: Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad, reunited
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