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If we were talking about music or Web video, this would be easy: Two musicals, unsatisfying in their current forms, need only to be mashed up, and both might thrive. At Primary Stages, Michael Hollinger’s Opus tells an involving story about a string quartet’s imploding, like a highbrow Fleetwood Mac. The show is hobbled, alas, by the fact that the actors aren’t playing their instruments: They’re faking it to a recording. (The contrived last scene, which erases most of the subtle drama that’s preceded it, doesn’t help.) Meanwhile, in the East Village, Grant James Varjas’s 33 to Nothing tells no story to speak of—well, a bland, self-involved one, also about a band’s breakup—but gets plenty exciting whenever the cast of five stops talking and starts banging out remarkably good rock on their guitars, drums, and keyboards. Why do we go on thinking it’s okay to watch actors pretend to be musicians, particularly after John Doyle’s Sweeney Todd? Beethoven may be tougher to play than Sondheim, but I’d give up a little musicianship if it meant watching a true performance instead of canned instrument-syncing. Conversely, why didn’t anybody sit Varjas down and tell him his music deserved better than his libretto? He’s making a case for rock music as theater music, but nobody’s going to believe it when it’s yoked to a story like that. Pro Tools wizards, take it away. — Jeremy McCarter

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New York Magazine Reviews

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