Playhouse on Park’s “[title of show]” can feel like an ode to entitlement. It’s about two not-quite-starving artists who decide on a whim to write a musical on a tight deadline, so it can be considered for the New York Music Theater Festival.
The festival is a real-life thing. The two male characters are named Jeff and Hunter because they’re based on “[title of show]” creators Jeff Bowen and Hunter Bell. The two women they convince to join them in this self-reflective, autobiographical meta-musical, Susan and Heidi, are likewise based on the show’s other collaborators/castmates Susan Blackwell and Heidi Blickenstaff. There’s a fifth character, Larry (based on the show’s original orchestrator and music director Larry Pressgrove), whose keyboards serve as the show’s entire orchestra.
The characters’ belief in themselves, and in their show, is what “[title of show]” ends up being about. That can be endearing for awhile, but gets grating. Look how clever! Look how creative! Look how successful!
The show takes its show-about-a-show-that-is-the-show-you’re-seeing concept seriously, which is to say comically. There are many jokes about the idle conversations that Jeff and Hunter are having are scripted remarks they’ve chosen to include in the show they’re writing. There are gags about revealing people’s real phone numbers onstage. The actors wonder aloud how they will end a scene that they are that moment performing.
There’s a lot of straightforward, non-mindbending humor in the show as well: funny names, funny reactions and puns, lots of puns. Many of the songs can stand by themselves without turning in upon themselves. “Die, Vampire, Die!” — about blood-sucking feelings of inferiority and self-doubt — is a four-part-harmony stand-out. “Monkeys and Playbills,” a litany of obscure Broadway musicals, is the kind of number that lands in cabaret performers’ solo club acts. Secure songs like this make up for the just-too-self-referential ditties such as “An Original Musical,” “I Am Playing Me” and “Filling Out the Form.”
Real Broadway stars’ names are dropped to add to the verisimilitude and insider-jokiness. Real theaters are mentioned, too, including the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, where “[title of show]” was revised and workshopped in 2005; in the show, Susan mistakes the venue for “The Shaquille O’Neal Center.”
“[title of show]” is several stages removed from its New York Music Theater, off-Broadway and Broadway productions, each of which starred the real-life Jeff, Hunter, Susan, Heidi and Larry and contained fresh material based on the realities of “[title of show]” at the time it was performed. The musical has settled into one uniform version, has trickled down to small theaters such as West Hartford’s Playhouse on Park, and is likely to be inescapable when college and community theaters get hold of it next.
This is a show for theater geeks who find the process of creating a musical as fascinating as the musical itself. It is the musical itself. When the storyline loses that sense of wonder and awe, and starts being about what it’s like to be in, or produce, or rewrite a musical, a lot of the charm is lost. But at that point “[title of show]” has changed tactics and wants to be about friendship and honor and sincerity and truth.
As with so many shows at Playhouse on Park, “[title of show]” has a natural amiability. The performers seem like real folks trying their hardest. The staging is intimate. The set is simple (though, with a background arch, stairs and platform, more complicated than the script requires it to be). There’s such an avoidance of slickness that when songs need to be belted or harmonized or accompanied with big gestures, it comes off ironic or unnatural.
As Jeff and Hunter, the leading-mannish Miles Jacoby and the smaller, wirier Peej Mele form a sort of Mutt and Jeff double act. As Susan and Heidi, Ashley Brooke and Amanda Forker have the finer voices, and the more down-to-earth attitudes. Musician Austin Cook provides able comic relief, punctuating some of the routines with blank stares or deadpan comments.
Director David Edwards (who did a well-received “South Pacific” at Ivoryton Playhouse in 2015) keeps things loose-seeming yet clearly tightly rehearsed. The laid-back air seems incongruous with such a hyper-self-conscious show.
You can probably already tell if “[title of show]” is the kind of thing you would enjoy. You don’t have to write a new musical about your own feelings regarding such a show. In fact, please don’t. One of these is enough for now.
“[title of show]” runs through Jan. 29 at Playhouse on Park, 244 Park Road, West Hartford. $50; $45 for students and seniors and Let’s Go Arts cardholders 860-523-5900, playhouseonpark.org.
