A New Golden Age for Musicals About Two Guys

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We happen to be living through a great moment for musicals about two men that were at one point developed at the Upright Citizens Brigade. On Broadway, there’s the trucker-hat-filled Gutenberg! The Musical!, and in theaters, there’s exclamation-mark-free Dicks: The Musical. Gutenberg! is more earnest and Dicks is much filthier, but they share that tagline and corresponding mutual desire to summon old-fashioned glitz and glamour on a shoestring budget.

You can learn a lot from their shared development history: Gutenberg! was at UCB in 2003, later heading through the now-defunct New York Musical Theatre Festival before its run Off Broadway. Dicks was at UCB in 2015, back when it was called Fucking Identical Twins. When we talk about theaters and festivals closing, these are the sorts of projects that might get lost in the process. UCB closed its Hell’s Kitchen space in 2020 and laid off its theater staff, and then was acquired by new owners in 2022. On the potentially bright side, it has announced plans to reopen on 14th Street, originally planned for fall 2023, but recently moved until 2024. May that bring us more comedy, sure, but also more The Musicals.

Elsewhere in Dicks news, the good people at A24 slipped us an advance listen to their podcast this week (out as of today), which features the new faces of indie film: Nathan Lane and Patti LuPone. At the top of the show, Lane says, “We’re just going to sit around for an hour and bitch,� and boy do they proceed to do just that. If you like sitting in a booth at Bar Centrale and eavesdropping on the next table over, enjoy. The two of them hit all their expected marks: Nathan wants everyone to read Isaac Butler’s The Method, and Patti says yet again that she thinks Broadway is dumber than ever and doesn’t want to do it anymore — though, if you believe the rumors circulated by the newsletter for Broadway’s Best Shows (and we sort of do, considering it’s an arm of the Jeffrey Richards empire) she’s in development on some project with Ariana DeBose.

Crucially, however, Patti and Nathan reveal that stars are just like us, in that they shamelessly email pr people asking for tickets too. “I wanna go see Here We Are and I can’t go to the opening, so I told Rick Miramontez, ‘I need comps,’� Patti announces, explaining that she learned the trick from Elaine Stritch, who would get tickets for whatever she wanted by just going to the box office and announcing she’s Elaine Stritch. That trick worked for Stritch every show, except Mamma Mia! Damn those Swedes.

—Jackson McHenry

Visit our theater calendar for a complete list of shows.

A Bad Harvest for Shucked

This week’s grosses are out. Critics Jackson McHenry and Sara Holdren, editor Christopher Bonanos, and writers Rebecca Alter and Jason Frank discuss the numbers, and the news that Broadway’s corniest musical, Shucked, will close.

Jackson McHenry: I guess the producers already saw the writing on the wall in announcing the closing and a tour, but poor Shucked. Even a Reba ad couldn’t save them.

Rebecca Alter: It just isn’t right! THE WORLD IS UPSIDE DOWN. CORN IS THIS NATION’S MOST POPULAR CROP.

Jason P. Frank: I am choosing to memorialize Shucked as a success story. Who knew when this show was announced that it would gain this many fans? And I think it plays well both on the road and in its already-announced West End production.

Christopher Bonanos: Speaking of “The World Turned Upside Down�: Hamilton is back over 100 percent, after a few weeks’ dip. Average ticket sale of $180, too.

McHenry: An interesting comparison there to the Hamburg Hamilton production closing. It’s got staying power in NYC but literally very hard to translate.

Bonanos: Prince Harry enjoyed it, at least.

McHenry: Yeah, they’re seemingly doing very well on the West End. Guess you have to have been on either side of the Revolutionary War (or at least get English language wordplay) to appreciate it.

Alter: How does Melissa Etheridge’s box office compare to the weekly intake from, say, a tour?

McHenry: It’s an interesting bet from Circle in the Square with Melissa given that she’s only doing five shows a week. At least it has an intermission so there’s a merch and drink sales opportunity there.

Alter: Speaking of merch, I wish we had the numbers on that. Hearing a whole lot of chatter about these Gutenberg hats.

Bonanos: The Gutenberg hat is sold out, at least on the show’s website. The real feel-good story this week, though, looks to be Merrily We Roll Along. Daniel Radcliffe + 40 years’ built-up affection for the cast albums + impeccable reviews = 100 percent sales at $220 a ticket. I just got a call from 1981, and it’s confused.

McHenry: To be fair, it’s hard to feel entirely good about average $220 tickets.

Sara Holdren: Ha, Jackson, I was like “keep your mouth shut, Holdren, don’t be the one that complains about the cost� — but thank you!

Alter: And it’s not like they need to charge super high prices to keep a dragon clock or DeLorean running … but I guess salaries.

McHenry: It’s a mixed feeling. Very happy for the creative success of it, and also more than a little bummed about Broadway as even more of a luxury product — complete with stemmed glassware at the Hudson.

Gutenberg! The Musical!’s Broadway Dreams Mostly Come True

By Sara Holdren

There’s a certain kind of theater parody made by theater people, where the characters are either provincial rubes or name-dropping, Olivier-quoting grandees of their local scene, and theater is made out to be a kind of small-town cult for the flamboyantly uncool. It’s a safe space for group back rubs and vocal warm-ups that sound like abstract orgasms; for scarves and berets and carrying copies of An Actor Prepares in your “I Can’t, I Have Rehearsal� tote bag; for miniscule budgets, massive ambitions, enough earnestness to knock Oscar Wilde sideways; and, most of all, for dreaming of Broadway. Waiting for Guffman, Christopher Guest’s peerless 1996 mockumentary, is perhaps the paragon of the form. (If you haven’t seen it, stop reading this review and come back to me in one hour and 24 minutes.)

Which Is Which?

Staff writer Devon Ivie noticed similarities between the dialogue of newly opened Gutenberg! The Musical! and Oh, Hello. (The two shows do share the same director.) Here are four scenes — can you identify the show from which they come?

*Scene 1*
Actor 1: ♪ Oh, I’m so depressed that we’re moving out ♪ [harmonizing]
Actor 2: Okay, all right, that was interesting. I got a few big problems with that. First off, we do not have the rights to Bill Joel’s “Movin’ Out.�
Actor 1: Right, that’s why I yodeled it.
Actor 2: That was way too big of a line reading. So don’t do it again.

*Scene 2*
Actor 1: We could only afford three of them.
Actor 2: Yes. But they are professional musicians. Hit it!
[The band jams hard — Billy Joel’s “My Life.� It’s awesome. They dance. Then one cuts them off with a conductor’s flourish.]
Actor 1: And … stop! If they play even one more note we have to pay for the song.
Actor 2: And we have literally no more money.

*Scene 3*
Actor 1: You probably noticed that we’re on the “weird side� of Seventh Avenue, but the Jones Theatre is a real, honest-to-God Broadway theater.
Actor 2: So many great shows have played here.
Actor 1: Captain Applejack.
Actor 2: Nic Nax of 1926.
Actor 1: Make Way for Lucia.
Actor 2: The Bishop Misbehaves.
Actor 1: I Killed the Count.
Actor 2: And, of course, The Respectful Prostitute.

*Scene 4*
Actor 1: Here in this theater, haunted by ghosts who could not book a different theater. Here in this theater which is basically on Sixth Avenue. So many great playwrights have staged their works. Tennessee Williams and his sister Serena. You know, they were rivals but they loved each other.
Actor 2: I blame the father.
Both: He pushed them too hard.

****

Answer: Scenes 1 and 4 are from Oh, Hello.

Dispatch from Jersey

Vulture Fellow Marlene Knobloch recommends The Pianist, running at George Street Playhouse in New Jersey until October 22.

In 1946, the Polish-Jewish pianist Władysław Szpilman wrote down his story of survival during German occupation in Warsaw; his family was sent to death in Treblinka. The memoir inspired the 2002 film, The Pianist, which won three Oscars and was nominated for Best Picture. But where the movie savors the brutal changes of scenery, from Adrien Brody walking through the splendid, old beauty of Warsaw, to the narrowness of the Warsaw Ghetto and the deathly cold of snow-covered Polish winters, this stage adaptation, directed by Emily Mann, relies on sound: You hear the fashionable chatting of pre-war Warsaw coffee houses, exploding bombs, trains hurtling towards death camps, a detuned piano, the radio announcement of the victory of the Red Army. And then there’s the beauty of Chopin —the plain power of his music and his highly memorable melodies. —Marlene Knobloch

Whispers of the Week

“So there’s a warehouse in New Jersey where all the Broadway shows go when they die.�

— Woman on the subway explaining how the Broadway Flea Market gets its goods.

“You know, theater is also this long, but they have an intermission.�

— Guy at a screening for Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.

“I’m curious about that postgraduate relationship.�

— Theatergoer convinced they spotted Imelda Staunton in the audience at Merrily We Roll Along, perhaps to cheer on former Harry Potter co-star Daniel Radcliffe.

Elsewhere …

➽ Daniel Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff, and Lindsay Mendez took lie-detector tests for Vanity Fair. Among other topics, the co-stars address Groff’s infamously spitty performances.
“What’s your secret to staying so hydrated?� Mendez asks.
“I get wet when I—� Groff begins.
Mendez and Radcliffe shake their heads. “No, say something else, please, say something else.�

➽ Joanna Merlin, the original Tzeitel in Fiddler on the Roof, died at 92.

➽ Suffs, a musical about early-20th-century efforts to win the right to vote for women, heads to Broadway with Hillary Clinton as a producer.

Good for Glenn