The Broadway Theatre Review: Gutenberg! The Musical

By Ross

“Oh God, I’m so excited…It has to go well tonight!” And we totally understand as we are told, grandly and comically by our two agile and determined hosts of this “one night only reading” of a new “historical fiction” musical. What exactly that is, you may ask? No need to worry. Because with a flippant kick to the buttocks, the game is on, repeatedly, and continually explained. The schtick is full throttle onwards, and upwards for Gutenberg! The Musical. Or downward, depending on your take on the proceedings.

It’s clearly the most straightforward of physical comedies, wrapped up in the reading of a musical played straight and bent to an enraptured audience. The crowd seems so openly and enthusiastically invested in the joker cards played by these two reunited actors working hard for their money. And when they exclaim Ta Da!, that it’s Gutenberg the Musical! – emphasis on the exclamation point – you better be there fully for these two hard-working entertainers for the next two-plus hours of repetitive jokestering. Because if you aren’t that overtly thrilled to see the former costars from The Book of Mormon; Josh Gad (Broadway’s Putnam County Spelling Bee) and Andrew Rannells (Broadway’s The Boys in the Band), live loud and funny on stage, hamming it up big time as buddy writers of a musical, then the imagination that they are asking you to bring to this laugh moment is going to be a heavy burden to bear. At least it was for me.

They aren’t kidding, to be frank, as we watch them openly mug their way through this concoction, singing some mediocre songs that find a balance somewhere between funny and stupidly silly. With a concept-heavy book, music, and lyrics by Scott Brown and Anthony King (Beetlejuice), the proceedings feel as structured and rote as can be, even when they “go off” the scripted rails, with permission. It’s cute but obvious where they fling themselves, stomping the same steps, knees high and cartoonish, as they attempt to find financing for this twisted musical that has little to do with the actual events surrounding the creation of the printing press by a wine-making Gutenberg. This isn’t a history lesson, but I’m guessing you probably understand that from the get-go.

While donning numerous baseball caps with signage to keep us on track, the two play it hard and broad as every character within this fabricated musical formulation. They sing and they prance, working up a sweat to make us laugh by sometimes referring to a repeated joke time and time again. Unfortunately for me, Gutenberg the Musical failed to pull me in. I smiled. And chuckled often, never really getting bored (although I wished it could have been way shorter) but never really getting hooked on their attention-seeking games. Most around me were thrilled, laughing as if their life depended on it, finding the funny in every repeated line and joke setup delivered. Now I wasn’t exactly sitting there stone-faced. I snickered at many of the jokie lines delivered, but as directed by Alex Timbers (Broadway’s Here Lies Love), laughing out loud big and strong was a gift given to others. Not to myself or to my companion.

But this show might be outside the Timbers directing box, requiring something other than his experiential spectacle-seeking framework. This comedy show masking itself as a musical in search of a producer needed a stronger hand and a tighter rein to pull this into something other than the formulaic, broad-humored piece that sits uncomfortably on a Broadway stage. On a surprisingly expansive set by scenic designer Scott Pask (Broadway’s Shucked), with straightforward costuming by Emily Rebholz (Broadway’s Jagged Little Pill), determined lighting by Jeff Croiter (Broadway’s Cost of Living), and a solid sound design by ML Dog (Broadway’s Straight White Men) and Cody Spencer (Off-Broadway’s Broadway Bounty Hunter), the musical duo tries to take us through the paces with never-ending energy for repeated lines and kicks. The songs were obviously ridiculous, sounding good thanks to music supervisor T.O. Sterrett (Broadway’s Wicked) and music director Marco Paguia (Broadway’s Girl From the North Country), but the cleverness only came in snippets and in the duo’s forced physicality, which had little to do with the melody or script.

It’s difficult to watch performers work this hard when the humor isn’t exactly there in the source material. They have to pull out every possible stunt that they have, and if necessary do it over and over again, assuming we will stay with them on this journey. I guess I wasn’t part of that pack. Getting more excited by the fact I saw Janet (D’Arcy Carden) from “The Good Place” during the forced intermission; a structural framework that was both required by the storyboard formula but not needed by me. Save your head space and journey downtown for the much funnier Titanique, a show that goes off-script in all the right hilarious ways, without ever giving us the feeling of being forced to laugh. Or hey, it’s Halloween season! Take a bite out of Dracula – A Comedy of Terrors if you want a good, solid, bloody, laugh-out-loud show – although, now that I’m thinking about it (and not Dracula’s abs, I wish they had made that show a musical. That structure had better viens for it. But that’s just me, and my sense of biting, funny, Celine Dion humor.