Word: goodmans
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...sure enough, now it is one, opening last week off-Broadway with a contradictory set of expectations. On the one hand, it's a rare case of a musical with lots of hype potential that has emerged fully formed--book, lyrics and music by newcomer Paul Scott Goodman--with almost no advance publicity. On the other hand, the musical is burdened, rather unfairly, by comparisons with a very different show, Rent, simply because it originates in the same downtown theater (and with the same director) as that trend-setting hit. Can theatrical lightning strike twice...
...hopes ride largely on Goodman, a Scottish-born singer-composer who was writing and performing one-man shows before he reread McInerney's book three years ago and decided it would be good material for a full-scale musical. "The book was set right when I came to New York City," says Goodman. "I could relate to the fact that [the main character] was a writer. I thought I could write from an honest place." His first draft sparked the interest of the New York Theatre Workshop and director Michael Greif, who developed the show over the past two years...
...best, but Bright Lights Big City (no comma now) has a more engaging mix of substance and flash than any other musical so far this dismal season. Goodman's adaptation, quite faithful to the novel, follows Jamie (nameless in the book though called Jamie in the 1988 movie starring Michael J. Fox) from his dreary job as a fact checker for a snooty, New Yorker-style magazine through his debauched, drug-addled all-nighters on the New York club circuit. It fleshes out, via flashbacks, his fashion-model ex-wife, with whom he's still obsessed, and his mother, whose...
...Goodman's pop-rock score, almost entirely sung through, tends toward the predictable (there are songs, alas, called I Love Drugs and I Wanna Have Sex Tonight), but his lyrics are clever, fractured correlatives for the life-style he's chronicling ("One more topsy-turvy, hunky-dory, manic panic, magic high..."). And if the hard-rocking numbers never really get the pulse racing, the lyrical interludes give some excellent singers a chance to shine, particularly AnnMarie Milazzo as Jamie's mom, who sprinkles Happy Birthday Darling with country-and-western teardrops...
...Goodman said the book will draw on the two women's personal friendship, which began 25 years ago when O'Brien and Goodman were Neiman fellows at Harvard...