Like so many other teenage boys, I too had to suffer through my own high school production of Bye Bye Birdie. I played boy-next-door Hugo and watched another friend—taller, with the ability to grow actual sideburns—swiveling his hips in his best Elvis impersonation as the star, Conrad Birdie. That’s what I couldn’t get out of my mind as I watched James Snyder as Cry-Baby, the eponymous character of the latest John Waters screen-to-stage Broadway musical adaptation, as he masterfully swiveled his own hips and had a guitar strapped to his back, a cute lock of his pompadour drooping into his eyes and a sarcastically snarled upper lip. It’s no accident that Cry-Baby: The Musical feels like Bye Bye Birdie—with more tongue. Well, not exactly. It’s also a super-lubed Grease patch. (A musical I was spared from having to perform in high school but had plenty of girlfriends who had worn out the VHS tape from constant repeat viewing.) In any event, it’s what every schoolgirl seems to swoon for: the bad boy who’s actually not bad after all.
The age-old good-girl-meets-bad-boy story line has pleased audiences for generations (everything from Romeo & Juliet to Heathers), and John Waters has used it as the crux of many of his movies. During a press preview of the Broadway musical, he admitted as much, stating that he just took what he knew—the Baltimore Squares and Drapes (Waters insists he was a Square)—and added a 1950s-style rock ’n’ roll sheen.
The original movie was never my favorite either. He cast Johnny Depp as silly bad boy Cry-Baby (with an actual tattooed tear below his eye): Depp was part James Dean, part Elvis and we still associated him with 21 Jump Street (and all the girls sighed). It was Waters’ cast of misfits—characters like Hatchet-Face and Pepper—as well as actresses like Mink Stole—that put his signature on it; just as Almodóvar’s use of trannies and actress Rossy de Palma (aka Picasso Face) always showed his own eye for the unusual as he became more mainstream. To see the scrubbed and Broadway-beautiful faces of the cast of Cry-Baby on stage, it’s too easy to forget that this is still meant to be a satire of all those 1950s stereotypes when it resembles more of a Bye Bye Birdie rip-off. We aren’t blessed with a fat man in a dress to remind us this is still intended as high camp.
Because of this radical change of intention—despite the unsettling funny polio picnic of the first scene (complete with boy in an iron lung) and a drinking, smoking, loud-mouthed pregnant teenager (Carly Jibson as Pepper)—there’s no getting around how derivative the musical feels. Songs by David Javerbaum and Adam Schlesinger are filled with funny pop references, which will surely be enjoyed for repeat listens; but there are few moments of surprise. The songs feel more like reheated musical classics, with a few spicy additives to hide the bland ingredients. Most of the time I was too busy paying attention to the hot, sweaty dancers jumping and jiving to Rob Ashford’s aerobic choreography to care. Or I was wondering how Catherine Zuber was able to design costumes that stayed on their tight dancers’ bodies—and wishing for some lewd costume malfunction that would help make the entire thing a little trashier.
Because let’s face it, those of us going to see a John Waters musical opening weekend want a little more John Waters: screwball references, outlandish acts, kinky sexual pranks and as much white-trash revelation as possible. But that’s just us fans. The rest of the squares will be happy to laugh along to the subversively sly moments masked by a feel-good patina—a perfect opening to slip them some tongue.
I know I should be incensed, but I’m happy to have even a portion of Waters’ cracked sensibility screwing with mainstream America’s mind. Can you imagine when Cry-Baby is remounted in a high school auditorium in Alabama with some jock playing the lead opposite the pretty blonde with dreams of one day majoring in musical theater? Genius.
In fact, with two shows on Broadway, now’s the perfect time to get someone on the next John Waters adaptation, Serial Mom: The Musical. A housewife who murders because her neighbors don’t recycle? Yeah, it’s time.
Open run. Marquis Theatre, 1535 Broadway (third floor of Marriot Marquis Hotel), 212-307-4100; $35-$120.
The age-old good-girl-meets-bad-boy story line has pleased audiences for generations (everything from Romeo & Juliet to Heathers), and John Waters has used it as the crux of many of his movies. During a press preview of the Broadway musical, he admitted as much, stating that he just took what he knew—the Baltimore Squares and Drapes (Waters insists he was a Square)—and added a 1950s-style rock ’n’ roll sheen.
The original movie was never my favorite either. He cast Johnny Depp as silly bad boy Cry-Baby (with an actual tattooed tear below his eye): Depp was part James Dean, part Elvis and we still associated him with 21 Jump Street (and all the girls sighed). It was Waters’ cast of misfits—characters like Hatchet-Face and Pepper—as well as actresses like Mink Stole—that put his signature on it; just as Almodóvar’s use of trannies and actress Rossy de Palma (aka Picasso Face) always showed his own eye for the unusual as he became more mainstream. To see the scrubbed and Broadway-beautiful faces of the cast of Cry-Baby on stage, it’s too easy to forget that this is still meant to be a satire of all those 1950s stereotypes when it resembles more of a Bye Bye Birdie rip-off. We aren’t blessed with a fat man in a dress to remind us this is still intended as high camp.
Because of this radical change of intention—despite the unsettling funny polio picnic of the first scene (complete with boy in an iron lung) and a drinking, smoking, loud-mouthed pregnant teenager (Carly Jibson as Pepper)—there’s no getting around how derivative the musical feels. Songs by David Javerbaum and Adam Schlesinger are filled with funny pop references, which will surely be enjoyed for repeat listens; but there are few moments of surprise. The songs feel more like reheated musical classics, with a few spicy additives to hide the bland ingredients. Most of the time I was too busy paying attention to the hot, sweaty dancers jumping and jiving to Rob Ashford’s aerobic choreography to care. Or I was wondering how Catherine Zuber was able to design costumes that stayed on their tight dancers’ bodies—and wishing for some lewd costume malfunction that would help make the entire thing a little trashier.
Because let’s face it, those of us going to see a John Waters musical opening weekend want a little more John Waters: screwball references, outlandish acts, kinky sexual pranks and as much white-trash revelation as possible. But that’s just us fans. The rest of the squares will be happy to laugh along to the subversively sly moments masked by a feel-good patina—a perfect opening to slip them some tongue.
I know I should be incensed, but I’m happy to have even a portion of Waters’ cracked sensibility screwing with mainstream America’s mind. Can you imagine when Cry-Baby is remounted in a high school auditorium in Alabama with some jock playing the lead opposite the pretty blonde with dreams of one day majoring in musical theater? Genius.
In fact, with two shows on Broadway, now’s the perfect time to get someone on the next John Waters adaptation, Serial Mom: The Musical. A housewife who murders because her neighbors don’t recycle? Yeah, it’s time.
Open run. Marquis Theatre, 1535 Broadway (third floor of Marriot Marquis Hotel), 212-307-4100; $35-$120.
