The Tony Award-winning director of Urinetown returns to Broadway with Gettin' The Band Back Together, a hilarious new musical comedy that The New York Times calls, "A feel-good class act! A playful, irreverent, and genuinely funny musical."
He always wanted to be the next Bon Jovi, but Mitch Papadopoulos (Mitchell Jarvis, Rock of Ages) left those daydreams behind for a day job. When this big-shot banker is handed a pink slip on his 40th birthday, he's forced to move back in with his mom (five-time Golden Globe nominee Marilu Henner, "Taxi") in New Jersey.
A run-in with his former music rival leads to a threat of foreclosure on Mitch's family home, unless he can win The Battle of the Bands- a rematch over 25 years in the making. So he dusts off his guitar, gathers his old gang, and sets out to win back his house, his pride- and maybe even the high school sweetheart he left behind- proving it's never too late to give your dreams one last shot.
And given the musical's two-or-three year gestation period, director Rando had plenty of time to trim the repetitions (and cut a couple gratuitous stereotypes from the secondary character line-up). Every bar band has to learn when its riffs are wearing thin.
You can smell the flop sweat before Gettin' the Band Back Together even begins, as Ken Davenport-the show's lead producer and also, not coincidentally, its principal author-takes the stage with a handheld mic to deliver a curtain speech. "What you're about to see is one of those rare things on Broadway these days: a totally original musical," he claims. But although the show is not based on any single preexisting souce, it is, in fact, supremely unoriginal, from its formulaic '90s-movie plot to its instantly forgettable '80s-rock score. A community-theater vanity production that has somehow surfaced at a Broadway house, it is schlocky at every turn.
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