Bomb Over Broadway
By WILLIAM A. HENRY III
NICK & NORA Music by Charles Strouse; Lyrics by Richard Maltby Jr.
Book by Arthur Laurents
When the curtain rises on the only new American musical of this Broadway season, the sole character onstage is a dog. That turns out to be depressingly symbolic. Five years and more in the making, derived from the beloved Thin Man movies, shaped by creators whose credits range from Gypsy and West Side Story through Applause and Annie to Miss Saigon, cast with three Tony Award winners and designed by two more, Nick & Nora should have absolutely everything going for it. But the show that opens on Broadway this week is a crashing bore -- cranky and arbitrary as a love story, tedious and pointless as a murder mystery, ham-handed as comedy, clubfooted as dance, at best wanly pleasant as music. A few scenes work, some quite well. The final 10 minutes achieve a truth and simplicity underscoring the barren brittleness of what has gone before. But ultimately the show fails at its most basic task: making audiences care about, or for that matter simply believe in, the characters.
This failure is a pity for everyone involved, and for the American theater. As the cost of Broadway production soars and the number of new shows per season plummets, each arrival becomes precious -- especially the handful of big musicals, the Great White Way's economic mainstay and artistic signature. The producers of Nick & Nora blamed Broadway economics for their decision to cancel out-of-town tryouts. Instead the show played a near record nine weeks of in-town previews at full prices, prompting New York City's consumer- protection department to promulgate new rules for theater advertising. During that time, songs were scrapped and replaced, sometimes more than once; dialogue was rewritten; scenes were restaged; and a principal performer was fired.
It turns out to have been the usual shifting of deck chairs on the Titanic. Writer-director Arthur Laurents gave his plot not just one hook but two: the murder of a female bookkeeper with a surprisingly glamorous set of associates and the marital troubles of Nick and Nora Charles (Barry Bostwick and Joanna Gleason), the detectives who are on the case. But Laurents seems to have had trouble taking either half of the story seriously. The mystery investigation involves a series of pantomime flashbacks, each sillier-looking than the one before. The title characters are written so carelessly that in the opening scene one cannot be sure whether they are newly wed or suffering from seven- year itch. Their marital discord flares up out of nowhere and ends just as abruptly. The wife's flirtation with an oily gangster fits no visible aspect of her personality. It is also baffling that she seems to find her husband raffish and charming when he is portrayed as an obvious alcoholic. Nora's closest bond seems to be with an old school friend, now a movie star, who induces the couple to take on the murder case. In this role, Christine Baranski, normally an actress of delicacy and insight, stomps about and grinds her jaw like a man in drag.
Laurents was offered plenty of advice about ways to improve the show -- from composers Stephen Sondheim and Jerry Herman and playwright Anthony Shaffer, among others, according to sources close to the producers. It was all rejected. So was the testimony of the public, which walked out in droves. At a performance last week, two elderly women in the front row tottered out about 20 minutes before the end. This writer, seated behind, longed to join them.