Suck suck suck

Let me just start by saying that I own every ABBA record ever made, cry every single time I watch "While You Were Sleeping," and get all gooey inside when watching "Love Actually." So I'm a big fan of schlock and pablum. "Showgirls" is my favorite so-bad-it's-good movie. I hope that gives me some credibility when I say that Joe Brooks's new Broadway musical "In My Life" is a soulless, artless, steaming pile of crap.

Crap, clap, pap

At least I get the semi-camp value of "You Light Up My Life," the ha-ha-I-made-a-pact-with-the-devil song penned by Brooks in 1977. That year Brooks laughed himself silly all the way to the Oscars and and the Grammys. He even shared (yes, shared) a Grammy with Barbra Streisand's "Evergreen" for song of the year. But by the following year his talent well had been pumped dry when his next movie with a title song, "If Ever I See You Again," hit the theaters. It is considered one of the worst movies of all time. How can that be, with such stellar talents Shelley Hack, Jimmy Breslin, and George Plimpton?

Joe Brooks reminds me of Herman Munster, who, in a dream sequence, accepted an award for his musical rendition of "Dry Bones" on a ukulele: "I would like to thank...the little people....I would like to thank them...but I can't...because I did it all myself." Producer/director/composer/writer/actor Joe Brooks is a one-man band. Except that his song remains the same and, in the case of "In My Life," replicates itself into oblivion.

Hack, slack, smack

Brooks is obviously not talentless; it could be he's just insane. He directed "The Lords of Flatbush," composed the best-selling single in the history of pop music, and implanted in Baby Boomers' brains dozens and dozens of memorable jingles for products such as Dr. Pepper (It tastes too good to be true), Pepsi (You've got a lot to live, and Pepsi's got a lot to give), Dial Soap (Aren't you glad you used Dial?), and Maxwell House (Maxwell House and you).

Brooks ably manifested his genius in the 10-second form (which is very hard to do), but when his writing extends to the 2-hour form demanded by Broadway theater, he stretches his genius so thin it loses its elasticity and falls limp to the floor. "In My Life" is like a super sundae of all 31 Baskin-Robbins flavors that tastes like none of the individual components and leaves you with a wretched stomachache.

Trash, bash, cash

The story itself is not radical or different. JT, a young singer-songwriter with Tourette's, meets Jenny, a young writer for the Village Voice who self-identifies as a control freak. She digs the music JT sings on a college radio station. They immediately sleep together, she finds his tic cute, he makes her more relaxed, they fall in love, move in together, and plan to get married, all in a matter of weeks (or 20 minutes in theater time). But there's a catch. One of God's angels, a deceased, extra-faggy CPA named Winston, with a British accent, is dreadfully bored up there in heaven (which, depressingly, has floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets), so he devises a plan to create "God's first reality opera," and picks JT as his leading man. Never mind that JT's mother, an inexplicably Blasian woman who sings arias in Italian while washing the dishes, and his sister, a devastatingly precocious 11-year-old Blatina (Luis said he would have no problem pushing her into traffic), have already died tragically. Winston decides it's time for a family reunion.


Watch, little girl, you don't get killed by that...Ooh, too late!

"Lemon!" JT blurts out in imperfect rhyme in one of his Tourette's episodes. Lemons make JT happy, and later in the play they appear in a bowl on the kitchen counter. Fine, great, symbolism: When life hands you lemons, make lemonade. Got it. But in the ensuing tragedy, which basically describes the whole show, the lemons don't appear again, until the end of the show. Winston decides to give JT a brain tumor, which I think was used only so that Brooks could create the line "There's a little rumor...someone's got a tumor..." and so that Winston could dance with the skeleton (of the soon-to-be-late) JT and, gasp, open up the skull and pull out a yellow tennis ball representing the tumor. Blecch. Ptui.


David Turner (right) dances with the future of his career

Gay, play, fey

Let's talk about Winston, shall we? Part Frank N. Furter, part Edward Scissorhands, part Madame, Winston is the worst gay stereotype imaginable: bitchy, campy, effeminate, lascivious, cross-dressing. His British accent only makes things worse. The actor who played Winston was funny. He stole the show. He elevated the material. And he was unbelievably offensive.

Winston was the gay minstrel. He was Rochester, Charlie Chan, and Rita Moreno in "West Side Story" all rolled into one. The part of the audience that genuinely loved the show (about a third, I'd say) loved Winston. They loved him because it was easy and safe to laugh at the fag in drag. There was no good reason to make him such a sissy, other than to make the pain of accepting JT's potentially fatal disease easier to handle. The final, jaw-dropping bitchslap came at the end of the show when Winston flitted offstage, winking at the audience, and said, "Do you believe in fairies?" Oh no he di'nt.

As if the Winston character wasn't bad enough, God, in case you didn't know, is a short, stocky, bald but lovable guy named Big Al (Al = Almighty, get it?). In an effort to get Winston, the casting director of God's opera, to notice him, Al auditions by singing and playing commercial jingles, including one about Dr. Pepper.

This, my friends, is the wormy core of the bad apple.

Brooks penned the Dr. Pepper jingle, as well as the Volkswagen promo he spouts as the best car ever made (backhand those Holocaust survivors, why don't you?). Did he use this device because he wouldn't have to pay royalties? Or was he doing a whole Pirandellian thing of himself as author as God? Did he use the name Al just so that God could say "You can call me Al"? Did Brooks troll Washington Square Park for smack to write this drivel? Worse, did he write it while sober?

Tripe, snipe, wipe

Brooks's own jingles were probably the smallest things he appropriated. I could smell "Rent," "Fame," "Godspell," "Cyrano de Bergerac," "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "Cabaret," Gilbert and Sullivan, and every Lifetime movie ever made. But the point is that I just didn't give a rat's ass about the characters. Even Demi Moore in "Ghost" is more believable than these characters. The lyrics are so poor and shallow they make "You Light Up My Life" look brilliant. They are Susan Polis Schutz poems set to music. If I'd had to swallow one more insipid sliver of musical tripe, I'd need to suck on a lemon.

Speaking of lemons, by the end of the show the audience has descended into such apathy or seething hatred (we thought the people next to us were going to pull out AK-40s and gun down the theater) that when a giant lemon cardboard cutout worthy of Magritte appears, everyone has completely forgotten that lemons make JT happy...and that lemons also mean "it sucks."


What's that sucking noise?

In the end, Winston, the gay-us ex machina, relents, and the young lovers get to live. Even all the dead people attend the wedding. But by then, no one cares.

Sour, glower, cower

"At least they're getting paid," one of my show companions, an actor, said. I couldn't argue there. The performers, most of whom clearly have talent, willingly chose to do the show, and they sold it the best they could. Sure, they're getting paid, but do they want this show on their resumes?

The bottom line is I hated this show so much it was worth the logorrhea. If I could take Joe Brooks aside personally, I would say, to paraphrase Peggy Gravel in "Desperate Living," how can you ever repay the 105 minutes you have stolen from my life? I hate you, your husband, your children, your relatives, and your dog!
There's a very good reason why there's no intermission.

I was not alone in this opinion, not at all. The audience applause was perfunctory at best. But some audience members of a certain demographic (those traveling to Manhattan via bridge and tunnel) seem to have genuinely enjoyed the show. About a third of the audience gave the performers a standing ovation. Based on my theatergoing experience, standing ovations are so common nowadays they're meaningless. Did people really think it was good? Is it possible that writers don't even have to try to make sense anymore or devise anything original? Do audiences really think this is original?

Fuck, suck, duck

Or is this show, as someone put it, so brilliant that no one can "get" it? Is Joe Brooks a visionary, pulling one over on everyone, hoping to laugh himself all the way to the Tonys? I can only guess, but one of the musical numbers had a clue: "You don't always get what you pay for." Well, in this case I got out of this show exactly what I paid for my seat: Nothing.