Theatre in Review: It Shoulda Been You (Brooks Atkinson Theatre)

	Chip Zien, Sierra Boggess, Tyne Daly. Photo: Joan Marcus

Stepping into the Brooks Atkinson the other night, I may as well have been stepping into a time machine. It Shoulda Been You, a musical farce about a wedding gone wrong, strikes me as nothing less than a trip back to those long-gone days of the 1960s, when "trendy" comedies with titles like My Daughter, Your Son; Help Stamp Out Marriage; and There's a Girl in My Soup indulged in mildly risqué humor while reassuring the matinee crowd that the Sexual Revolution was only a passing fad. By the way, I can't tell you how many of these entertainments were directed by George Abbott: In addition to Help Stamp Out Marriage, his résumé includes Norman, Is That You?, in which a dry cleaner, abandoned by his wife, turns to his son for solace, and discovers the young man is gay; How Now, Dow Jones, in which a distraught employee of the title company -- she's pregnant and without a husband -- announces that the stock index has hit 1,000, causing a financial panic; and The Fig Leaves are Falling, in which a middle-aged man abandons his wife, Lillian, for the winsome Pookie Adams, of the Sexual Freedom League. The latter entertainment is notorious for the nightly auction of a chicken to one lucky audience member. But I digress.

It Shoulda Been You -- the 21st-century version of a late-career Abbott farce -- advertises its intentions in the first few minutes, with a sight gag about Spanx, the lazy comedy writer's best friend. A couple of minutes later, Lisa Howard as a rather plump sister of the bride, looks at the wedding dress and says, "Who am I kidding? I wouldn't fit into this if I was cremated." It's the first of many lines that has the appearance and sound of a joke, but, if you give it more than second's thought, it doesn't really make sense. At the performance I attended, the audience started to respond, then the laugh trailed off, as if a case of group perplexity had set in. It Shoulda Been You is loaded with moments like this. The mother of the bride, talking to her daughter's ex, whom she vastly prefers to the groom, snaps, "My daughter breaks your heart, and you don't have the decency to call me?" The bride's Jewish uncle, unimpressed by the WASP groom, sings, "He's so white bread, he sweats mayonnaise." (The script traffics in the hoariest of Jew - WASP gags; a running bit about the groom's attempts to speak Yiddish is, well, unspeakable.) The bride's henpecked father, reporting on a family dustup, says, "Your mother and I had words, but I didn't get to use any of mine." They're all sort-of jokes, the kind of thing you put in a script as a placeholder until something better comes along -- except that, in this case, nothing did.

It Shoulda Been You is the also the second case this season -- the first is Fish in the Dark -- of a television comedy writer essaying Broadway. Like Larry David, author of Fish in the Dark, Brian Hargrove seems not to have gotten the memo about adapting one's style to a different format. Just to be clear: In a 22-minute sitcom episode, it is perfectly possible to live from one gag to the next, worrying little about pushing forward a plot and maintaining character consistency. In the case of a play running two hours (more or less), such niceties really should be attended to. This point is especially important in the case of It Shoulda Been You, because, at about the halfway point, Hargrove throws a plot curveball that, even as it enlivens the proceedings to no end, makes absolutely no sense in terms of the characters. I can't divulge it, but it certainly titillates the more conservative members of the audience.

Still, while I would probably sacrifice an arm to avoid seeing Fish in the Dark again, It Shoulda Been You has its fair share of guilty pleasure moments, thanks to a cast of comic actors who carry on as if they're in a Kaufman and Hart classic. As the abrasive mother of the bride, who brutally plays favorites among her daughters, Tyne Daly brazens it out, earning laughs with her stare that kills. "Hello, Marty," she says to her daughter's ex, and you can practically see storm clouds forming over her brow. Contemplating a member of the groom's family, whom she cordially loathes, she starts to make a fist, ready to deliver a haymaker, until, caught in the act, she quickly, casually, inspects her nails, peacefulness incarnate. The lady is a pro and thank God she is on the premises. She is well paired with Harriet Harris, as the groom's mother, who dearly would love to sabotage the entire affair. Whether staggering into the room, hungover, to take an unwanted phone call; agonizing over how she managed to fail to raise a gay son; or using her cut-glass diction to insist that she is thrilled to have Jewish in-laws ("Don't be silly, dear, 'Dreidel Dreidel' is my new song."), she offers a tutorial on getting laughs under the most inhospitable circumstances. And Edward Hibbert scores as the all-seeing wedding planner ("a nuptial Houdini") who, confronted with his first surprise in years, settles in to enjoy the spectacle.

Also adding some much-needed professionalism are Sierra Boggess and David Burtka as the bride and groom, watching chaos swirl around them; Josh Grisetti as Boggess' ex, on a mission to prevent disaster; Montego Glover and Nick Spangler as the frisky attendants; Chip Zien and Michael X. Martin as the bridal couple's fathers; and Adam Heller and Anne L. Nathan, double-cast as servers at the reception and two of the more obnoxious members of the bride's family. As the bride's sister, who receives more than a few staggering shocks during the course of the evening and finally ends up with a prospective husband, Howard excels in a largely thankless role, playing straight woman to everyone else until late in the show, when she is given a number that requires her to shout the blues like Bessie Smith, a clear breach of her character.

The songs, lyrics by Hargrove (and several others), and music by Barbara Anselmi, tend to restate what we already know about the characters, and rarely with any additional wit. However, "This Day" does a solid job of setting up the characters and situations; "Albert's Turn," Hibbert's big solo; and "Love You Till the Day," sung at the reception by Glover and Spangler and amusingly loaded with unwanted emotional overtones, are probably the standouts.

David Hyde Pierce's direction is clean and fast-paced, and he pulls off some amusing effects, especially a moment when all four parents, stunned by a certain revelation, face upstage, paralyzed and unsure how to proceed. It all unfolds on Anna Louizos' amusing set, a bi-level hotel interior loaded with faux French provincial touches, which stands in for many locations. Ken Billington's lighting is typically seamless and flattering to the cast; he also uses the many on-stage chandeliers for some lovely color effects. William Ivey Long's costumes cleverly work a blue palette and fit each character well. Nevin Steinberg's sound design is a solid piece of reinforcement.

I can't really recommend It Shoulda Been You, but if you have to see it, at least you'll enjoy the people. Based on the performance I attended, in which the audience laughed lustily throughout the second half, there may be an audience for this -- then again, I saw an audience roar through Honeymoon in Vegas, for all the good it did. All I can tell you is, there surely was a time when It Shoulda Been You would have sincerely amused -- but the Johnson administration is long over. -- David Barbour