No one loves a good dramatic musical more than I do -- but sometimes, rather than cry along with the music, you just wanna laugh. Thanks to two of New York City's best Off-Broadway theater companies, the York and the Atlantic, we have two great new opportunities to do just that.
The sounds currently emanating from those theaters are audience members chortling and guffawing in response to the companies' respective productions of a great old show called Enter Laughing (formerly, "So Long, 174th Street") and a wonderful new one whose very title tips you off to its hilarity quotient: What's That Smell: The Music of Jacob Sterling.
Enter Laughing proudly represents an entire sub-genre of entertainment based on the foibles of showbiz folk. So does What's That Smell?, which has just opened at the Atlantic Stage 2. Here we have a tribute to a scarily untalented, blessedly fictional songwriter whose self-involved, "look at me" personality is all too accurately indicated by his spikey, frosted hair and faux-hipster apparel.
Jacob is played to the pretentious hilt by David Pittu, who also wrote the show's book and lyrics. The conceit here -- and that's a doubly appropriate word! -- is that Jacob is being interviewed and presenting his songs on a low-budget, public access cable TV show hosted by an outlandish musical theater queen named Leonard Swagg (the hilarious Peter Bartlett).
Like so many other talent-free "artists," Jacob is prone to grandiose pronouncements along the lines of, "I'm just grateful to be working and creating again and for the chance to somehow move the art form forward." The truth is that he's doing his part to move the art form back a few hundred years with his banal, derivative music and execrable lyrics. (Sample: "What's that smell? I can't quite place it / Is it cole slaw? Is it cheese? / On these city streets, let's face it / Someone always pukes or pees.")
Pittu's script is as bitingly funny as his lyrics, and is particularly notable for his snarky use of acronyms. The very first line of the show is "Hello, I'm Leonard Swagg, and this is Leonard Swagg's CLOT -- Composers & Lyricists of Tomorrow." When Jacob tells us that he got his degree from the Southern Palo Alto School of Music, Leonard exclaims, "So much talent comes out of SPASM!" And when Jacob notes that, as a young man, he received a commission to write a song cycle from the Cedar Rapids American Musical Performance Series, Leonard enthuses: "Very impressive to get CRAMPS on your side so early on."
So skillful is the writing that Pittu somehow manages to bring up the AIDS crisis and 9/11 without obliterating the show's overall mood of tremendous good humor. Going way out on a limb, Pittu/Jacob delivers such lines as: "I moved to New York in 1984, but George Orwell didn't prepare me for the two international crises under way at that time. I'm talking of course about AIDS and the British takeover of the American musical theater. Two ghastly epidemics which are still, to this day, credited with the death of the Broadway musical." Later, we're treated (?) to a mind-numbingly bad song from "That Goddamned Day," Jacob's opus about 9/11.
The reason all of this works is twofold: (1) Pittu is not really making jokes about these tragedies but, rather, is satirizing the ineptitude of a talent-free artist's response to them; and (2) the show is co-directed with a subtle touch, rather than a sledgehammer, by Neil Pepe and by Pittu himself, who hereby demonstrates it's not always a bad thing when one person has a hand in several different areas of a show.
In addition to the deliciiously satiric performances of Pittu and Bartlett, the production allows Brandon Goodman, Matt Schock, and Helene Yorke their moments in the spotlight as three young people who are privileged to perform some of Sterling's most unforgettable songs.
As Mel Brooks proved with "Springtime for Hitler," it takes great talent to write intentionally awful material that's funny rather than embarrassing. David Pittu and Randy Redd, the actual composer of Jacob Sterling's music, get an A+ for crafting songs that are so bad, they're brilliant. What's that smell? Well, I don't know about you, but I smell a hit!
