Faith Prince, Kevin Chamberlin and Kerry Butler in Disaster! at the Nederlander Theatre, New York. Picture: Jeremy Daniel Photography
Disaster! continues at the Nederlander Theatre, New York until 3 July.
Star rating: two stars ★ ★ ✩ ✩ ✩
It’s New York City, 1979, and the floating Barracuda Casino and Discotheque is celebrating its opening night, a night that’s heading straight for disaster, a whole series of disasters in fact, from earthquake and tidal waves in the Hudson River to attacks by piranhas and giant rats. That’s the premise of the musical aptly titled Disaster! It has the distinction of being the first Broadway musical opening of 2016.
A spoof of the disaster movies that filled multiplex screens during the 1970s, it’s fitted out with a jukebox score of pop ditties from the era and comes to the Main Stem after well-received runs Off and Off-Off-Broadway.
It’s a promising concept, but as now launched onto Broadway, the result – by my compass at least – falls far short of the laugh-riot territory it’s aiming for.
The show is the brainchild of Seth Rudetsky, a popular Broadway accompanist and raconteur – a sort of Boswell of Broadway musical doings, with his own radio programme and series of cabaret shows – and his pal, actor Jack Plotnick. The latter also has directed the thing, while Rudetsky, in addition to supervising the music and the song arrangements, takes on a principal role.
I didn’t see the earlier incarnations, but it’s possible that the show’s many bits and pieces might well have come across as hysterically funny in the scruffy and intimate environs of fringe theatre. Blown up to Broadway proportions, however, the work shapes up as a messy potpourri of cheesy, often questionable gags and low-grade special effects.
The tunes from the 1970s – jaunty love songs such as ‘Still the One’ and disco anthems such as ‘I Will Survive’ – are dragged out mainly for laughs, and in many cases, we only hear smidgens of them. After a distraught man tells how his wife was shredded to pieces by a dining room ice sculpture when the ship capsized, he deposits parts of her body into the sea while singing the Commodores’ ‘Three Times a Lady.’ Are you laughing?
The song credits list some 34 titles, including ‘The Lord’s Prayer’.
A 17-person cast, studded with some impressive Broadway names, works dutifully if rarely successfully to keep things afloat. Tony-winner Faith Prince and Kevin Chamberlin pair up as a senior couple, Shirley and Maury, boarding the Barracuda for an evening of retiree fun. Shirley, however, has yet to tell her husband that she’s suffering from a terminal disease. Prince labours especially hard to make funny the many near-final and convulsive symptoms that come with the illness. Are you laughing yet? If not, wait until she leads the perfunctory tap dance number that causes her demise (the awkward choreography is by JoAnn M. Hunter).
Adam Pascal, who created the role of Roger in Rent, plays hunky Chad, and Max Crumm, who once upon a time starred as Danny in a revival of Grease, plays goofy Scott, a couple of waiters more interested in making out with the gals aboard ship than serving drinks.
Rachel York captures the one-note vapidity of the Barracuda’s headline entertainer, an airhead diva named Jackie, whose slinky, glittery costume becomes more revealing as the disasters pile up. Roger Bart is sometimes evil, sometimes seemingly bored as Tony, the nefarious owner of the Barracuda, who has cut all kinds of costs in creating a ship that is a potential deathtrap. Cue more laughs here.
Kerry Butler limns Marianne, an aspiring investigative reporter and Chad’s one-time fiancée, who apologises to him for not saying anything before leaving him stranded at the chapel.
Among others, Rudetsky pretty much deadpans his way through the role of the geologist who became a disaster specialist after his wife died in a volcano. Do I hear more laughter? He vainly tries to warn both passengers and crew beforehand but then becomes a hero once the mishaps begin.
Lacretta Nicole plays a one-time disco queen, whose renditions of some erstwhile disco hits start out excitingly but then are cut puzzlingly short. With the help of a life-sized rag doll replica, Baylee Littrell deftly doubles as Jackie’s kids, the twins Ben and Lisa.
A particular audience favourite at the performance reviewed was Jennifer Simard’s depiction of Sister Mary, a nun torn between her heavenly devotion and love of gambling. Her big number in which she makes extended love to a slot machine, while singing a mash-up of ‘Torn Between Two Lovers’ and ‘Never Can Say Goodbye,’ had the folks around me in stitches.
But despite their gales of laughter, I sat there glumly contemplating how the show was living up to its title – exclamation point and all.
Ron Cohen
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