There is an irony baked into the well-meaning but meandering new musical Label-less, a Gen Z revue created and directed by former 98 Degrees boy-bander Drew Lachey and his choreographer wife, Lea. On the one hand, the youthful and talented cast of 17 repeatedly emphasizes the desire to shed all labels and appeal to a common humanity. On the other, the entire evening is broken into segments in which they express their individuality by claiming membership in a subset that they embrace openly as an essential part of who they are. “I’m gay!” “I am disabled.” “I’m a nerd.”
The show is structured as a series of first-person monologues, sometimes performed tag-team style, very loosely sketching some of the issues that young people face: the weight of depressive thoughts, the pressure to look thin, the microaggressions (and occasional threat of real aggression) that comes from being Black or a woman or an immigrant scholarship student who has to work a job serving or cleaning up after their classmates. Each little speech, often culled from the experiences of the cast themselves, is followed by a musical number expanding on the theme performed karaoke-style to a backing track.
Stories about lingering misogyny segue into Paola Marcias delivering a powerful rendition of the James Brown classic “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” while two coming-out stories are punctuated by a cringey version of Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” in which the entire cast sashays across the stage with an energy that seems more game than celebratory. Many of the routines recall the performance style of Up With People, that youthful singing-and-dancing ensemble that was a staple of Super Bowl halftime shows in the 1970s and ’80 that was considered a cheesy throwback even then, the inspiration for REM’s “Shiny Happy People.”
Up With People famously accentuated the positive at all costs. But that’s not always the case for the cast of Label-less, which leads to some glaring disconnects. During an early cover of the Black Eyed Peas’s “Where Is the Love?” with lyrics about “People killin’, people dyin’, children hurt, hear them cryin’,” the cast is all smiles and bounces energetically around the stage as if auditioning for the judges on America’s Got Talent or So You Think You Can Dance?.
Happily, there’s plenty of talent in this cast — and they really can dance. Lea Lachey choreographs a mesmerizing pas de deux for Kendall Maley and Kaylee Bays in which the lithe Maley twists herself over and around Bays’s wheelchair with elegant sensuality. (The dancers make good use of wheeled risers and staircases on the simple set, which is not credited to any designer but well lit by Aaron Space.) The performers, all wearing loose black outfits by Jen Irvine that look like they could have been pulled from the rack of Forever 21, include some stand-out singers. Aaron Gillis Jr. brings a soulful flourish to Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” while Marcias and Cayla Nichole Harris tag-team on a stirring rendition of Andra Day’s “Rise Up.”
It’s in those moments that Label-less provides reassuring comfort that the youth are gonna be all right, that a new generation of Babes in Arms is going to overcome all obstacles to put on a show, just as Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland did nearly a century ago. But the show is encumbered by its earnestness between the songs, which include several poppy but forgettable originals by a variety of songwriters. Too often, the under-developed monologues sound like first drafts or AI summaries of stories you might hear on The Moth Radio Hour — and frequently end on clichéd platitudes like “My net worth is not my worth.” (Needless to say, none of the cast’s labels include being Republican or devoutly religious.)
I suspect Label-less might play better in high schools and colleges, perhaps at special assemblies in the handful of remaining DEI-friendly institutions where student audiences could then split up to discuss some of the issues raised and what resonated most with them. But at The Duke on 42nd, there’s a preachiness that proves inescapable. Micah Day, the guitar-playing quasi-narrator (and the production’s only live instrumentalist), insists near the end that the spoken-word vignettes aren’t “fiction or melodrama for the stage.” I never doubted that — I just wished they had the narrative detail and precision of the songs that followed.
Day also wraps things up by addressing each of his castmates by name (“I see you, Aaron”) in a ritual of inclusion that feels forced — especially since so many of his fellow performers never get a monologue of their own. That’s the problem with theater: It doesn’t lend itself to absolute togetherness, or to having 17 leads trying to carry a show. Leveling the playing field also means flattening it so that nothing stands out. ★★☆☆☆
LABEL-LESS
The Duke on 42nd Street, Off Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through Aug. 29 for $45 to $139