Carolee Carmello desperately tries to save new musical by Kathie Lee Gifford (photo by Jeremy Daniel)
Neil Simon Theater
250 West 52nd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 31 [new closing date: December 9], $35-$140
www.scandalousonbroadway.com
“Aimee Semple McPherson is a liar and a fake,” declares Asa Keyes (Benjamin Howes) at the beginning of the new Broadway musical Scandalous: The Life and Trials of Aimee Semple McPherson. In response, Emma Jo Schaeffer (Roz Ryan) proclaims, “Sister Aimee saved my life.” The two statements set up the unusual dichotomy that was McPherson, an enigmatic Pentecostal evangelist who was a female radio pioneer and the leader of the popular Angelus Temple in Los Angeles but might best be remembered for her mysterious disappearance at the height of her career. It took ten years for Kathie Lee Gifford — who wrote the book and lyrics, along with additional music — to bring Scandalous to Broadway, but now that it’s here, at the Neil Simon Theatre, it’s likely to follow in its subject’s footsteps and disappear, although not nearly as mysteriously. Two-time Tony nominee Carolee Carmello (Parade, Lestat) is very good as McPherson, spreading the word from high atop a blindingly white pulpit, but Gifford and composers David Pomeranz (who worked with Kathie Lee on her first show, Under the Bridge) and Disney veteran David Friedman make the proceedings feel more like an Up with People concert than a Broadway musical. David Armstrong’s direction is tiresome and repetitive, Lorin Latarro’s (American Idiot) choreography is nearly nonexistent (when it’s not head-scratchingly obvious), and two-time Tony winner George Hearn (Sunset Boulevard, La Cage aux Folles) is sadly, drastically underused. And it’s rarely a good sign when the Playbill includes a slipped-in loose sheet of the musical numbers that reveals that several songs in the second act have been axed. Today show cohost Gifford, whose husband, Frank, went to McPherson’s Foursquare Church when he was a child, spends too much time putting McPherson, and faith in general, up on a pedestal, essentially preaching herself, only without the edge that McPherson seemed to have. “Was she a true woman of God? Or just one helluva woman?” Louella Parsons (Elizabeth Ward Land) asks near the end of the show. Don’t expect to find out — or care — in the trivial Scandalous. [ed. note: On December 4, it was announced that the show would close on December 9, after thirty-one previews and twenty-nine regular performances.]