Theater nerds are a special breed. They can exemplify the best of what the medium has to offer. They can also get mired in ephemera, not unlike sports fans who fixate on batting averages or other arcane data at the expense of the game itself. The King’s Critique is a new musical by theater kids, for theater kids, and it’s in desperate need of adult supervision. Or of somebody, anybody, to rein in the excesses of what should be a modest show that instead has swollen to more than two and a half hours with a cast of 16 — only about half of whom can fit on the narrow stage of the Pershing Square Signature Center during the numerous production numbers. (The others tend to look on from the side during these scenes, like eager high school understudies whose drama teacher to make the chorus as big as the number of auditioners.)
The score, by Nat Zegree, is a pleasant grab-bag of musical theater pastiches and parody pop songs, with occasionally witty lyrics (by Zegree and Eric Holmes) that often call attention to themselves (“My God, I just rhymed weak with weak“). The real problem is Holmes’ bloated book, which unfolds at the aimless pace of a kindergartner trying to recount their favorite movie, one half-remembered plot point at a time. The story, set in some way-back time in an unnamed kingdom, follows a writer-director-actor named Josephine (Taylor Iman Jones, singing like a dream) who aims to defy a ban on women appearing on stage that was instituted by the foppishly retrograde King Benjamin (Justin Collette, overacting like a junior varsity Alex Brightman with his hands perpetually extended as if awaiting a manicure).
Josephine, who’s also writing a play that everyone thinks is brilliant despite its lack of an ending, teams up with a sad-sack troupe of actors that includes a philandering leading man, Sebastian (Sky Lakota-Lynch), a beanpole who proves unconvincing as both a lothario and as the heroine’s love interest. Jo also gets an assist from the king’s sister, a thinly veiled version of Camelot’s Morgan Le Fey played with scenery-chewing snark and flowing ginger tresses by the golden-voiced Donna Lynne Champlin.
But there are reversals, and reversals of reversals, in a narrative that seems stuck in the mold of ’90s teen sitcoms like Saved by the Bell — when it’s not lifting ideas directly from previous Broadway musicals (notably, during one long stretch, Mel Brooks’ The Producers, in a sequence that begins with a musical homage to “Springtime for Hitler”). Director Catie Davis leans into the juvenile broadness, and the result is an exhausting amount of onstage mugging and strained efforts at comedy by a cast made up almost entirely of shtick figures (some of whom seem to exist solely for a single, throwaway joke).
Aside from the occasionally amusing inside-theater references (“peasants” who win the lottery to see a play “are the finest audience members on earth”), the humor mostly consists of fart jokes, pants-around-the-ankles bawdiness, slapstick silliness, and vaudevillian quips that seemed dated a century ago (“You can say that again,” the king’s chief henchman tells him at one point, prompting the ruler to repeat what he just said verbatim.) Holmes even resorts to using “deez nuts” and “Honka Honka” as punchlines. All that’s missing are rim shott from the five-person band, which is led by Zegree himself (sporting an arrow-through-the-head band).
After an interminable first act, The King’s Critique briefly finds its footing. The post-intermission plotting is tighter, the songs stronger. Gabi Carrubba, as the king’s former mistress turned pre-reality TV celebrity, delivers a punchy Britney Spears parody full of spiky energy (complete with a spinning, oversize mini-hoop-skirt that fits the anachronistic aesthetic of costumer Emily Rebholz). The number is also completely tangential to the story. Jones, a Broadway veteran with a powerhouse voice, tears into her big Act 2 solo with scale-mounting, full-belt gusto. But the tune, a compressed version of her magnum opus play with the unwieldy title “The Gem of Arcanum Vitae,” is a typically convoluted story song that only in the final lines stumbles into a bigger message about the need for friends to “help you get by.”
There’s a good deal of talent wasted on this unruly royal mess of a show. The creators, no strangers to theater history given all the shout-outs to Hamilton, Dear Evan Hansen, Hamlet, etc., seem not to have absorbed the storied advice to creatives to “kill your babies.” In the case of The King’s Critique, that would mean finding a razor-wielding Sweeney Todd to run roughshod through Miss Hannigan’s orphanage until less than half are left standing. At least that would be a start. ★★☆☆☆
THE KING’S CRITIQUE
Pershing Square Signature Center, Off Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes (with one intermission)
Tickets on sale through December 20 for $49 to $149