The audience and the cast have a swinging good time in DISASTER! (Jeremy Daniel Photography)
Nederlander Theatre
208 West 41st St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 3, $65-$179
877-250-2929
www.disastermusical.com
There has been many a disaster on Broadway; Disaster! is definitely not one of them. The delightful musical comedy, which began life as a one-night charity benefit in 2011 and then had off-Broadway runs at the Triad Theater in 2012 and St. Luke’s in 2013-14, has made a simply fabulous transition to the Great White Way, where it runs through July 3 at the Nederlander Theatre. The show has kept growing since initially conceived by Seth Rudetsky and Drew Geraci, with bigger and bigger stars and significant changes to the script and music; the Broadway version is by cowriter, music supervisor, song arranger, and costar Rudetsky and his best friend, cowriter and director Jack Plotnick, a longtime character actor in film and television. It’s 1979, and Tony Delvecchio (Roger Bart channeling Jack Black) is celebrating the opening of Barracuda, his floating casino and discotheque moored in New York Harbor. A chintzy showman and businessman, Tony has cut just about every corner possible, worrying journalist Marianne (Kerry Butler) and Professor Ted Schneider (Rudetsky), who is concerned that the ship could not survive a natural disaster, which is likely to occur shortly. Among those on deck are Sister Mary Downy (Jennifer Simard), who is protesting against the casino and its debauchery; Shirley (Faith Prince) and Maury (Kevin Chamberlin), an older couple with a fierce love of life; Levora (Lacretta Nicole), a down-on-her-luck former disco diva who goes everywhere with her beloved dog in her handbag; Chad (Adam Pascal), whom Marianne left at the altar and his now working as a waiter on the ship, and his goofy buddy, Scott (Max Crumm); and elegant but not-too-bright lounge singer Jackie (Rachel York) and her young twins, Ben and Lisa (both played in hilarious fashion by Baylee Littrell). The show pays tribute to the great, and not-so-great, disaster movies of the 1970s, ingeniously coupled with beloved, and not-so-beloved, pop songs from that era.
Jackie (Rachel York) prays for a morning after as Ted (Rudetsky) and Ben (Baylee Littrell) look on (Jeremy Daniel Photography)
The main target is The Poseidon Adventure, but there are also references galore to the Airport films, The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, Rollercoaster, Tidal Wave, Piranha, and even Airplane! Simard’s nun character, speaking in a killer deadpan voice, is pulled directly from Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker’s classic 1980 spoof, while Prince excels in her homage to Shelley Winters in Poseidon. Meanwhile, the melodrama involving Marianne and Chad feels like a terrifically nerdy subplot from The Love Boat. The score features more than three dozen period favorites, delivered with extremely firm tongues-in-cheek, including Mary MacGregor’s “Torn Between Two Lovers,” Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman,” Queen’s “You’re My Best Friend,” England Dan and John Ford Coley’s “I’d Really Love to See You Tonight,” Orleans’s “Still the One,” Carly Simon’s “Mockingbird,” and Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff,” many of which become riotous set pieces, especially as things start looking more and more bleak and Tobin Obst’s (Newsies, Jekyll & Hyde) set begins falling apart with deliciously low-budget panache. The cast, superbly dressed by William Ivey Long (Chicago, On the Twentieth Century), does an amazing job keeping a straight face while the audience explodes in pure glee over each new reference or song snippet, which Rudetsky and Plotnick nail again and again. Littrell, the son of former Backstreet Boy Brian Littrell, nearly steals the show playing the twin siblings, going back and forth between Ben and Lisa in side-splitting, nearly impossible ways. The fun choreography is by JoAnn M. Hunter (School of Rock, Broadway Bound), who has a blast with the fab soundtrack. No mere jukebox musical, Disaster! is hot stuff indeed, a love letter to a simpler time and place; about the only thing missing is Sensurround.