Affectionate In-Joke
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Theatrical believers so exuberant that they could raise Tinker Bell from the dead unassisted, Bud and Doug of “Gutenberg! The Musical!” have written a new show they hope will be Broadway bound — as soon as they’re done giving their two-man performance of it for the big producers in the audience.
What’s that? Your cliché detector is beeping? Turn it off for a minute.
“Gutenberg! The Musical!” is a fictional take on Johann Gutenberg, the 15th-century inventor of the printing press and publisher of the Gutenberg Bible. Sounds deadly, you say? Yes, it does. But no, it isn’t — not by a long shot.
Despite its faintly awful title and cheesy-sounding premise, “Gutenberg! The Musical!” is also a thoroughly winning, dead-on musical comedy by Scott Brown and Anthony King. It had its premiere in London last January, ran at the New York Musical Theatre Festival in September, and has now opened at 59E59, where Bud (Christopher Fitzgerald) and Doug (Jeremy Shamos) walk the audience through their show.
The plot: Gutenberg lives in a small German town where an evil monk, determined to withhold biblical teachings from the people, schemes to keep them illiterate. When Gutenberg, wanting to give his neighbors something to read, invents the printing press, the monk tricks Gutenberg’s love interest, the busty but dim Helvetica, into destroying it. Eventually the press is rebuilt, but not before Bud and Doug, feeling obligated to tackle a serious issue, have appended a lesson about the ugliness of anti-Semitism. (“Because it makes our show important,” Doug explains earnestly.)
The show has almost nonexistent production values — Bud and Doug use baseball caps, each labeled with the name of a character, to differentiate among more than a dozen roles as they leap in and out of them. But accompanied by the unflappable Charles (T.O. Sterrett) on upright piano, and with lighting by Tyler Micoleau to provide aspirational ambience, they nod to Andrew Lloyd Webber, to Elvis, to every convention from the Old Black Narrator to the disco ball. It’s a spoof, but it works because it never winks at the audience. If it did, it would crumble into dust.
It also works because Mr. Fitzgerald and Mr. Shamos strike the perfect tone, giving Bud and Doug an irresistibly goofy enthusiasm, an innocent sincerity that defangs any potential snarkiness lurking in the script.
Directed with playfulness and precision by Alex Timbers, this is inspired, flawlessly calibrated silliness that takes aim at theatrical clichés in large part by embodying them. Knowing but never cynical, “Gutenberg! The Musical!” is an affectionate in-joke — it skewers Broadway’s paint-by-numbers mentality even as it pays spirited homage to the power of collaborative fantasy that fuels every stage success. A twoman show with crowd scenes and a chorus line,”Gutenberg!” is smart without ever being smart-alecky — not even when Doug, meaning to cheer up his pal, says,”Hey, Bud — let’s sell your car and go see a Broadway show.”
Its immense charm lies in its excitable imagination and paucity of material resources. Bud and Doug dream of a Broadway budget that would let them put “real dirt streets and real animals” on stage with a huge cast, but let’s hope they never ruin what they have by getting what they want. “Because,” as Gutenberg says,”it’s not the success that matters. It’s the dream!”
Until December 31 (59 E. 59th St., between Madison and Park avenues, 212-279-4200).