Fountains of Wayne songwriter Adam Schlesinger knows his way around a power-pop riff (see here), so it probably wasn't much of a stretch for him to collaborate with Daily Show producer David Javerbaum on the music for Broadway's Cry-Baby, which opened last night at the Marquis Theater. It's based, of course, on John Waters's camp 1990 flick about a fifties-era smackdown between Baltimore's squeaky-clean teen squares and a bunch of delinquent greasers, or "drapes." The stage version's score doesn't stray far from the four-chord sound of classic rockabilly, with songs reminiscent of some of the decade's icons, like Elvis, Little Richard, and Patsy Cline.

The trick, said Schlesinger, was the lyrics: "When you're writing for a show, you're writing part of the script. You have to tell the story. I guess one similarity is that in Fountains of Wayne, we do a lot of songs that are character-driven and have little stories within them." With Cry-Baby, he said, "our general concept was to make the music sound very familiar and period and then put lyrics on top that take you a little by surprise." (They succeed; you have no forewarning, for example, that a "Blueberry Hill"–esque ballad is going to become drape-heartthrob Cry-Baby's plaintive plea to good-girl Allison to kiss him "with tongue." Which she does.) "We would always try to come up with a concept for a song and then either a title or a direction for the lyric," said Schlesinger, "and work backward from there."