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Seattlest Pix 09Nov06
Gutenberg! The Musical! runs through September 27 at the Erickson Theatre Off Broadway, and you should "run" to get tickets ($25/$10 students/seniors). Ha ha! No, but seriously. We laughed like a booze-addled hyena for much of the night, with some startled expletives thrown in when things got...strange (we can't remember the precise lyric, but it had something to do with wanting to feel Satan's horns deep inside). After, we traded memorable quotes ("dirty thatch"!) with our companion all the way home.
Sweetly naive dreamers Doug (Troy Fischnaller, sporting an infomercial host's glib savoir faire) and Bud (MJ Sieber, sweatily determined) are the author and composer, respectively, of the musical based on their limited Google research of the life of printer Johannes Gutenberg, #1 on the A&E Channel's People of the Millennium list.
They know it's important to have your musical be about someone famous, but since so much is not known about Gutenberg's life, they decide to make it historical fiction--"What's historical fiction? It's fiction...that's true!"
They also know that it has to tackle a big issue, such as illiteracy, but since they know that most many Germans hate Jews, they also work in an anti-antisemitism message by making an adorable little flower girl a raging bigot.
Musical written, they're holding a backers' audition with no set and ersatz costumes, the two of them playing all the roles in their gripping story of Gutenberg, a very bad Monk and his cat Satan, and a buxom wench named Helvetica. (Don Darryl Rivera mans the piano and keeps the scenes in the right order.)
They couldn't be more excited to be this close to being Broadway-bound, but unfortunately this doesn't translate into any kind of artistic competence. Despite their know-it-all airs--Doug is always stopping to explain what an "I Want" or "Charm" song is to the noobs in the audience--they're just two crazy kids trying to make it big who have cribbed an occasional fight scene from Star Wars. The choreography by Kimberly Coffin is a delightfully varied grab bag of all wrong notes, as is the music.
Sieber and Fischnaller are so nebbishly lovable, from their ambitious ego-stroking to their codependent creative spats, you leave wanting them to pitch you their next terrible musical, too. There's something intrinsically American about the Broadway musical--beyond the location of course. Even wanting to put one on is a flowering of rosy optimism, and writers Anthony King and Scott Brown display a touching fondness for Doug and Bud (and all of us) who live one foot in a brighter future, who "eat dreams."
Top photo: Doug (Troy Fischnaller) as Helvetica and Bud (MJ Sieber); bottom photo: Doug (Troy Fischnaller); photos by Erik Stuhaug
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OK, just so I can ease my troubled conscience:
Am I the only one who read the title and thought that there was a typo, and that this was a musical about Steve Guttenberg?
@ChrisB: What about "side-splittingly funny" made you think of Steve Guttenberg? Ha! I kid. Actually, anecdotally, about 70% of the people I've talked to think "Steve!" first thing.
I thought of the Gutenberg Bible first thing, but that is because I was religiously indoctrinated starting early in my childhood and have still never even heard of this "Steve Guttenberg."
Yeah, but this is the age of irony and the Reduced Shakespeare Company. I can totally see someone doing a wacky theatrical production (musical or meta-musical) all about the last days in the bunker called: EVA!
If Tammy Faye Messner (nee Bakker) can inspire not one, but two musicals, I can totally see one for the acting power behind the Police Academy oeuvre ;)
And that shames me.
No, you're not the only one to think of Steve Guttenberg - check out this YouTube video made by the people who did the Chicago production of the show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnhYwkObk3g Then come see the Seattle show.
you all beat me to it. damn three men and a baby (in which guttenberg was far better than his police academy days).