Alex Timbers, the peripatetic director also represented on Broadway by “Here Lies Love” and “Moulin Rouge,” knew instinctively how much to shape and how often to step aside and just let Gad and Rannells do their things. As the actors are virtually the entirety of “Gutenberg! The Musical” — stars, and thanks to the dozens of character-identifying caps they take on and off, supporting actors and chorus, too — it helps that their rapport has an ineffable ease. There’s a whiff of Abbott and Costello apparent on the stage, mixed with mutual respect and peppered by theatrical friction.
Brown and King wrote the book for the uneven stage version of “Beetlejuice,” a musical that did not do their ingenuity as much justice as does “Gutenberg!” Gad’s Bud and Rannells’s Doug, two Broadway wannabes from Nutley, N.J. (it’s always Jersey, isn’t it?), have invited us to the James Earl Jones Theatre for a purported backers’ audition for their show, one so ghastly it would take more than a play doctor to fix it — maybe a play hospital.
“Gutenberg! The Musical” relies in part, but not too strenuously, on an audience’s prior knowledge of the clichés of musical theater. It pokes gentle fun at the desperate delusions of the borderline-talented among us, who hold fast to the belief that they, too, should have their names up in lights. Think of Christopher Guest as the immortal, tin-eared Corky St. Clair, the revered community-theater king of Blaine, Mo. in Guest’s 1996 mockumentary, “Waiting for Guffman,” and you’ll have a picture of the room in which Brown and King are romping.
Musical theater indulges in self-referential humor too often to catalogue it all. It just so happens, though, that another such entry is being revived on Broadway this fall: “Monty Python’s Spamalot,” a hit recently at the Kennedy Center that is rife with jokes lampooning musical conventions, typified by the priceless number, “The Song That Goes Like This.”
“Gutenberg!,” like “Spamalot,” offers a kind of chiropractic adjustment to the psyche in troubled times. The only trigger warning required is one that cautions laughter ahead.
Rannells and Gad talk to us in “Gutenberg!” as if we’re in the bunny group at a theater camp where they’re the counselors: “What’s a ‘motif,’ Doug?” Gad’s Bud asks, glancing at the audience to let us know he’s asking on our behalf. “A motif,” Rannells replies, “is when you use the same music over and over again, but it’s not lazy.”
They’re deft physical comics, gleefully prowling Scott Pask’s cluttered set, and occasionally interacting with conductor Marco Paguia’s three-member onstage band — “The Middlesex Six.” (Bud and Doug could only afford half of them. Bonus points if you know their name is another Jersey joke.) The actors’ smooth irreverence is tempered by a sweet sort of appreciation for Bud and Doug’s love of musicals — even if the idea of building one around Johannes Gutenberg, the 15th century German inventor of the printing press, is an affront to bad musicals everywhere.
The musical that is “Gutenberg! The Musical” will never be mistaken for “West Side Story,” but that is really not the point. Brown and King have packed the show with numbers that manage to be both entertaining and as clunky as a ’67 station wagon. And composed a piece that might be a bit more fitting in a cabaret than in a Broadway theater. That is, of course, until you secure the services of the cutest couple on Broadway.
Gutenberg! The Musical, book, music and lyrics by Scott Brown and Anthony King. Directed by Alex Timbers. Set, Scott Pask; costumes, Emily Rebholz; lighting, Jeff Croiter; sound, M.L. Dogg and Cody Spencer; music direction, Marco Paguia; orchestrations, T.O. Sterrett. About 2 hours. Through Jan. 28 at James Earl Jones Theatre, 138 W. 48th St., New York. gutenbergbroadway.com.
