Better Than The Producers

By Richard Zoglin

A strange fever has gripped the New York theater world. It's called The Producers. Mel Brooks' smash Broadway musical reduced even the hardest-boiled critics to Jell-O, snagged every Tony Award in sight, and doesn't have a good seat left until the end of the Bush Administration. It's the musical theater's Second Coming.

Not quite. The Producers is a lot of very good things (We love you, Mel!) but adventurous and groundbreaking are not among them. That old Broadway dazzle is fine, but musicals can also provoke us, engage us in fresh ways, push the boundaries of the form. For that you have to look beyond Broadway--where, by chance, three inventive new musicals have arrived to give us something of what Mel and Max Bialystock (Honest, we love you both!) can't.

A real emotional connection with the people onstage, for one thing. The late composer-lyricist Jonathan Larson earns our tears even before we walk into the theater. He died, tragically, of an aortic aneurysm just weeks before his soon-to-be-a-hit Rent opened. Now one of his earlier works, Tick, Tick...Boom!, has been revived off-Broadway. It's a slight, autobiographical piece (with a script worked over by David Auburn, author of Proof) about the struggling composer's own angst at reaching his 30th birthday. Yet this Portrait of the Artist as a Young Neurotic makes up for its self-involvement (Jon tries to get his agent on the phone; Jon gets an encouraging phone call from Stephen Sondheim) with sincerity and self-deprecating wit, along with Larson's passionate, rock-inspired music. He was trying to push the musical into new territory; Tick, Tick...Boom! is a heartfelt, oddly uplifting glimpse of a sadly unfulfilled innovator.

Whereas Larson's show is sweet and cuddly, Urinetown is blunt and in your face. This Brechtian fable--a sellout hit in its tiny off-off-Broadway theater that is moving to Broadway in August--is set in a city where the water shortage is so dire that private toilets have been outlawed. The play overdoses a bit on winking self-references ("Everything in its time, little Sally," one character says to another. "Nothing can kill a show like too much exposition"), and the promise of sharp political satire is lost on the way to a generic cartoon of a greedy corporation oppressing the masses. But when was the last time even sophomoric left-wing agitprop was the subject for a musical--much less one that's so entertaining? The vest-pocket production has outsize energy, as does the terrific, beefy Kurt Weill-like score by Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis. They aim for comic-operatic heights and keep the audience soaring.

In The Last Five Years, having its premiere at Chicago's Northlight Theater, composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown manages something just as hard; he turns a modest, 80-minute, two-character musical into a richly satisfying emotional journey. It starts with a narrative gimmick. A man and woman tell the story, in alternating musical numbers, of their five-year relationship. She tells it backward in time; he tells it forward. She begins at the rueful end of a marriage and moves toward the love-struck beginning. He opens as a giddy guy going on a date and winds up the betrayer.

The dual narrative strands, beautifully woven by director Daisy Prince, add a layer of irony and melancholy to what otherwise might have seemed a pretty routine story. Jamie (Norbert Leo Butz) is a Jewish writer on the rise; Kathleen (Lauren Kennedy) is an Irish-Catholic actress whose career never takes off. There are clever interludes--an audition in which we hear Kathleen's inner turmoil, set to the melody of the song she's performing--and unabashedly romantic ones, like a mock Russian folktale that Jamie sings to his beloved on her birthday. The show is too sketchy in spots, particularly in its portrayal of Kathleen. But Brown's music (lushly orchestrated with Brown himself on piano) is the least arid and most accessible of the scores turned out by his generation of Sondheim disciples. This is smart, lyric-driven music that doesn't abandon melody or variety. One number rocks; another harks back to '30s Tin Pan Alley. And a wistful, turn-of-the-century-style waltz sends you out of the theater with a lovely, warmhearted souvenir. Most of the souvenirs at The Producers cost 20 bucks.