By THE ENTHUSIAST
"The Whole Being Dead Thing"
The show’s opening number, "The Whole Being Dead Thing," is the best first song in a Broadway show since "Welcome To The Renaissance" in Something Rotten! When Alex Brightman starts belting out the show’s 11 o’clock number right out of the gate, you know you’re in good hands.
Eddie Perfect
Here’s a songwriter who's taking a serious stab at living up to his name. Did I quote any of the lyrics from "The Whole Being Dead Thing" yet? No? Well, here you go:
Don’t be freaked,
stay in your seats
I do this bullshit, like,
eight times a week
So just relax, you’ll be fine,
drink your fifty-dollar wine
And take a breath –
Welcome to a show about death!
I raise my fifty-dollar wine to you, Mr. Perfect. Well played.
Sophia Anne Caruso
She invests her Lydia with a drolly dour sensibility -- world-weary, over it all, but in on the joke all the while. This is a seventeen-year-old who understands what it is to be a seventeen-year-old and knows how to show us that seventeen-year-old truth. At age seventeen.
Kerry Butler & Rob McClure
Butler & McClure have just about nothing to do here, but they’re so darn likable and such go-to Broadway troupers that watching them do nothing is really something.
The Set Amped-up, over-the-top, color-splashed and puppet-packed. Designer David Korins and director Alex Timbers have created something altogether ooky here. Wait – creepy, kooky, mysterious and spooky – that’s another creature-featuring musical altogether, isn’t it? Still, though – ooky it most definitely is.
The Enthusiast (offbroadway@outlook.com) is the pen name of critic Michael Collins. He reports back only on what’s good, never what’s bad. But what he declines to praise can speak volumes.
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