To recap the week in musicals, then: The Producers—hope you scalped a ticket when you had the chance. Legally Blonde—rent the movie. LoveMusik—wait for the CD.
W hen I say that Coram Boy lays it on thick, I mean thick like a mud slide. This import from the National Theatre in London uses a cast of 40 to tell the tale of a highborn English lad who wants to play music but is forbidden to by his father, so he runs away, but first he has a child, and then the child is thought dead, but actually he’s caught up in a world of white slavery and swashbuckling, villainy and noble sacrifice, and an onstage choir—in robes and everything—that sings Handel’s “Messiah.” Thick.
You have to admire hugely (and I mean hugely) director Melly Still’s willingness to pull out every stop, to throw the big set and the big cast and the big song into the middle of a Broadway that likes its straight plays pinched. (You also have to be glad the NT transferred this show in the same season as The Coast of Utopia: It’s boom time for New York stagehands and supporting actors at last.) But Still and adapter Helen Edmundson never quite make us care about the characters from Jamila Gavin’s novel as they zip around the cavernous Imperial. Some people were moved, it seems: The sniffles all around me at the end suggest that lines like “I love you, Alex—I love you still,” followed by harp and strings, are having the desired effect. But more often the show reminded me of a predecessor that did manage to lash the epic to the heartfelt. Now and then, actors plummet from the sky, backed by the full choir singing. Very Tony Kushner, I thought.
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