Like Fleet Week the week, Fleet Week: The Musical is a littledisappointing: all of these capable, strapping young men and women turned loose on New York City, and all of them hanging out in the wrong bar. The book’s double-duty premise—gays in the military thwart a terrorist plot while discovering their true sexualities—bogs down performances that are frequently delightful and occasionally outstanding. Tony nominee Melissa Hart (Georgy), who delivers the show-stopper “Libby’s Torch Song,” is relentlessly entertaining, and Byron St. Cyr, as the flamboyant bomber who would turn America into “the United States of Martinique” is superb. Just as good and just as gay, Rob Maitner, a Fringe veteran, turns his potentially clichéd role as an effeminate chaplain into a true original, just as he did with Mr. McQueen in the 1999 breakthrough Fringe production of Urinetown. Being the next Urinetown, of course, has become the ambition for every offbeat musical. Yet with its frenetic look-at-me glitz, Fleet Week has an air of desperation about it. Even the best performers can’t anchor a script that’s this hopelessly adrift.
Fleet Week: The Musical
By Mac Rogers
The Lucille Lortel
Fri, Aug 19 at 7 p.m.;
Sat, Aug 20 at 10:30 p.m.; Sun, Aug 21 at 2:15 p.m.; Tue, Aug 23 at 9:30 p.m.; Fri, Aug 26 at 04:15 p.m.