There’s a major new Broadway musical called New York, New York based on the Martin Scorsese film of the same name.
Type of.
Both the film and show have main characters named Jimmy Doyle and Francine Evans, both are set immediately after World War II, and both prominently feature a specific anthem by John Kander and Fred Ebb. You know, the one whose first five notes, played on a piano, are enough to automatically get the brain to fill in the rest.
And it’s that theme song alone, rather than the film, that is the true inspiration for the sprawling, unwieldy, surprisingly dull show, which opened at the St James’s Theater on Wednesday night.
Extrapolated from the text, “New York, New York,” directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, is about the people who wear those “vagrant shoes,” the ones who “want to wake up in the city that doesn’t sleep.” Jimmy (Colton Ryan) and Francine (Anna Uzele) now meet characters that author David Thompson dreamed up with Sharon Washington. They are musicians and singers, aspirants and dreamers. And sadly, none of them make much of an impression, as they’re stuck in a syrupy mess of good feelings and crunchy middle-class cheerleading.
As the various storylines approach their inevitable intersection, any hint of a crease or crease has been smoothed out. The most prominent victims are the redesigned Jimmy and Francine, who have been flattened into cardboard cutouts. The film’s Jimmy, portrayed by Robert De Niro, was an obnoxious, abusive, narcissistic idiot saxophonist who fell in love with Liza Minnelli’s Francine, a passionate singer who worked her way from big band canary to solo star; Their fleeting relationship would fail the smell test with 2023 viewers.
The new Jimmy is just a little irritant who’s evolved from good saxophonist to brilliant multi-instrumentalist, equally playing jazz with African-American trumpeter Jesse (John Clay III) and Latin grooves with Cuban percussionist Mateo (Angel Sigala) Stories are in roughly outlined. For Jimmy to end up as the human bridge between the Harlem and Spanish Harlem musical styles is quite an achievement for a white bread Irish kid. (A Jewish violinist, played by Oliver Prose, mostly exists on the sidelines.)
Meanwhile, Francine comes across as a spunky, powerful free spirit plugged into a 21st-century outlet. As a black woman, she navigates the treacherous waters of the music scene with relative ease, and setbacks seem to slip past her.
Ryan (‘Girl From the North Country’, Connor in the movie ‘Dear Evan Hansen’) and Uzele (‘Once on This Island’, Catherine Parr in ‘Six’) are technically fine, but they don’t fill out the drawn characters as well sketches. They don’t find the pain that drives Francine and Jimmy, nor the sexual attraction between them.
This creates a central void that further restrains the overly polished book – friction feeds the fiction.
And if anyone knows, it’s John Kander. An effective blend of louche syncopation, unabashed romance and biting sarcasm has long characterized Kander and Ebb on Broadway, from Cabaret to Chicago to their brilliant earlier collaboration with Stroman, The Scottsboro Boys.
The score for “New York, New York” juxtaposes new songs Kander wrote with Lin-Manuel Miranda, like the propulsive “Music, Money, Love”, with older ones set to lyrics by Ebb. Of these, the most famous (You Know What and But the World Goes’ Round) were pulled from the Scorsese film, while others were repurposed, such as “A Quiet Thing” from the 1965 series “Flora the Red Menace” and “Marry Me” from The Rink (1984).
But regardless of when or who they were written with, many of the songs lack Kander and Ebb’s signature jagged edge. That’s partly to do with the arrangements and musical direction of Sam Davis, which have a deficit in oomph, further adding to the show’s sexlessness – there’s no pulse if there’s no swing. (Kander and Ebb were more capable of that than most Broadway creators: listen to Kiss of the Spider Woman’s fantastically propulsive “Gimme Love,” for example.)
The rah-rah tone of the new show eventually becomes deafening. It’s all the more frustrating given the ambivalence branded into the title track, which alludes to the city’s erratic temper. “If I can make it there/I’d make it anywhere” – we’re in a difficult city – is followed by “It’s up to you/New York, New York”, which takes away the singer’s freedom of choice. But the show follows Frank Sinatra’s triumphant template rather than Minnelli’s more ambiguous one. In this pink vision, court cases are temporary, everyone gets along, and no one stands up to New York’s bad side.
Stroman has a rare affinity for classic Broadway showmanship, as seen in her work on Crazy for You and The Producers, but she can also radically stylize, as in The Scottsboro Boys.
Flashes of inspiration are few and far between here. A highlight is a tap number staged on Fernbalken, with a pair inscribed ‘JK 3181927’ and ‘FE 481928’ – Kander and Ebb’s dates of birth – and two of the Easter eggs lurking in Beowulf Boritt’s lively set, the dominated by towering fire escapes. The magical moment known as Manhattanhenge is evoked with superb assistance from lighting designer Ken Billington. And there’s, as always, the visceral thrill of seeing a big band take the stage when Jimmy’s combo smashes the title track at the end.
It’s not much to remember from a show that lasts nearly three hours and had such impressive potential. “You can be anyone here,” Jesse says at one point, “do anything here.”
If only “New York, New York” had not interpreted this sentence as a reassurance, but as an invitation to take risks.
New-York, New-York
At the St. James Theater, Manhattan; newyorknewyorkbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes.