Neurosis – DR2 Theatre, New York

Jennifer Blood in Neurosis at the DR2 Theatre, New York. Picture: Jenny Anderson

Neurosis continues at the DR2 Theatre, New York until 7 October 2018.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

Neurosis was a late summer entry in the oft-crowded, oft-unheralded parade of Off-Broadway musicals. While not the gem one might hope to find when making it to these offerings, it does present another opportunity to view a sampling from the deep well of New York’s musical performing talents giving their all to breezy, well-intended if not particularly enthralling material.

The show has a joke-filled book by television writer Allan Rice, joke-filled lyrics by Greg Edwards, and jazz-inflected if somewhat repetitive music by Ben Green, busily orchestrated by Green for the off-stage four-piece band. The plot boils down rather perfunctorily to the boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl formula, layered with a coating of somewhat dated but thankfully not too serious psychological self-help messaging. The show carries the tag ‘A Musical that Gets in Your Head’. According to his programme bio, book-writer Rice has a degree in clinical psychology.

There are also echoes of Jewish guy-gentile girl romance dating all the way back to that critically-loathed, long-running Broadway hit of the 1920s, Abbie’s Irish Rose.

The Jewish boy, in this case, is Frank, a magician wannabe working in the backroom of a magic shop, and the girl is Abby, a hard-working ad executive. Both share their life with a best friend invisible to others, a friend who also happens to be their own individual neurosis. Frank’s pal is simply named Neurosis, while Abby’s has the more florid moniker Neurosalina. They are always at their side, sometimes offering words of encouragement, sometimes words of caution, sometimes simply heckling.

Abby, just deserted by her latest boyfriend, now longs to meet a man who is Jewish, because she believes he will treat her nice. In her ballad entitled, ‘Make Him Mine’, Abby sings: “And when I’m feeling blue/He’ll know how to console me/Cause Jews have suffered, too.”  So, after a chance meeting with Frank where Abby discovers his Jewishness (he makes the toast ‘L’chaim’ when they share a drink), they quickly become ‘Boyfriend-Girlfriend’, as they happily sing in the Act II opener.

The romance breaks down, though, when Abby comes to dinner at the home of Frank’s parents. Abby comes face to face with the animosity of Frank’s mom, questioning the rightness of mixed-heritage unions. With Neurosis and Neurosalina getting into the fray, the evening ends in chaos with the ‘Meet-the-Parents Tango’.

However, with the help of a rather imperious therapist that Frank has been sent to after a contretemps with his boss, Abby and Frank learn to bring their neuroses out into the open. All parties join in the finale, happily advising us all to ‘Rock Your Neurosis’.

At the performance attended, Danny Gardner, who had just taken over the role of Frank, imbued the character’s haplessness with a winning – if not particularly Semitic – comedic flair. Gardner originated the role in an earlier production. If his chemistry with the comely Abby, especially well sung by Jennifer Blood, is more jovial than sexy, so what? It seems to fit the material. As the two embodiments of neurosis, Brennan Caldwell and Morgan Weed make a pair of lively sprites of questionable motivation.

Joel Blum and Susan J. Jacks bring some credibility to the sometimes-limp laughlines of Frank’s parents, who would much rather see their son go off to law school than be a magician, while Natalie Charle Ellis delivers a taste of Broadway pizzazz as the big-voiced therapist leading a couple of production numbers. Ian Michael Stuart completes the cast in a variety of roles, including one of Abby’s obnoxious boyfriends and Frank’s obnoxious boss at the magic shop.

Andy Sandberg’s brisk fluid staging on Charlie Corcoran’s fairly minimal set design is one of the show’s main assets, as is the smart choreography by Shea Sullivan, which gives a welcome kinetic lift to many of the musical numbers. And the performers, all eight of them, deserve a hand for the non-neurotic ease and confidence with which they carry it all out.

In an interesting doubling down of Off-Broadway talent and probably economics as well, it should be noted that Neurosis played its first weeks in repertory with another musical, now closed, entitled R.R. R.E.D., also directed by Sandberg and choreographed by Sullivan.

              Ron Cohen