Schedule	Buy Tickets
Ongoing	Every Tue, 7pm; Wed-Sat, 8pm; Wed, Sat-Sun, 2pm
Schedule exceptions: No performance Tue., 12/25.

Profile

By using a TV program to cast the show’s leads, the producers have made the show feel like an adjunct of the TV program, like a season-finale-plus-one. Where the casting process itself was concerned, devotion to duty saw me through only the first episode, so I don’t have much sense of the field. But what has reached the stage of the Brooks Atkinson reminds me a lot of that moment in presidential politics when you watch the party nominee take the stage at the convention and think: Him? As Danny, young Max Crumm shows some talent—a decent voice, nice charisma. But Crumm and his friends are plausible as bad kids only until the school’s actual bad kids return to stuff them back in their lockers. Laura Osnes shows even more promise as Sandy—the girl can flat-out sing—but she takes the goody-goody girlish thing too far. Even in the finale, after Sandy’s theoretical transformation to slinky sex kitten, she makes Natalie Portman look grizzled. Casting a musical is a dodgy business, so you can’t really blame the voters for making uninteresting choices (though it’s a little chilling to see that the collective acuity of the American people doesn’t surpass the average Broadway producer’s). In fact, their selections deserve better treatment than they’ve gotten from the facilitators of this experiment in democracy. A boy-meets-girl story set in a sock-hop-era high school is never going to be Lohengrin, but the creative team should at least be shooting for Spring Awakening. Instead, director-choreographer Kathleen Marshall does little to combat the blandness of so much of this material, and makes some of it worse. — Jeremy McCarter

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New York Magazine Reviews

• Jeremy McCarter's Full Review (8/27/07)

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