Famished: Diner, the Musical (Review)
Signature Theatre's "Diner" doesn't fulfill needs
Critics bemoan today’s trend of making new musicals out of hit movies, because too often the end result is a product that creates buzz and makes money, but isn’t compelling or even very interesting_- at least not intellectually. Often not artistically, either.
Diner, unfortunately, proves to be the latest case in point. A lot of time, effort and money went into a stage adaptation of Barry Levinson’s critically acclaimed 1982 film. Accomplished Tony-winning director and choreographer Kathleen Marshall was enlisted to flesh out the stories and freshen up the material for a live environment. Marshall and Levinson, who adapted his script, charged the equally accomplished Grammy-winning pop star Sheryl Crow to write original music and lyrics capturing the 1950s, when an edgier pop sound was just starting to find flavor out of a stew of R&B, blues and country.
In the end it’s only the music that lives up to the challenge. Through Crow’s score, we meet several of the women factoring into the lives of the young men, who were the film’s sole focus. Chances are you’ll even end up caring more about the women as written here. The men seem thoroughly stuck in a sexist time warp, unwilling, maybe even unable, to understand women and relationships — and expressing no broader sense of life’s meaning and purpose. By the time the first act ends in jail, after the surreal destruction of a nativity scene, these one-dimensional male characters are almost as much of a joke as the depicted three wise men — and every bit as unfunny.
If only more of the action took place within the stage’s handsomely realized art deco diner (designed by Derek McLane with assist from James Kronzer). If only there were more character development, and conversations about characters instead of just sex, love and football. And if only Signature’s great star Nova Y. Payton wasn’t wasted as an ensemble player who, as a stripper, shows off more of her skin than her vocal range.
“Gotta lotta woman,” Payton sings in one of the show’s last numbers. But sometimes a lotta anything, or a lotta everything, still isn’t enough.
Diner (
) runs to Jan. 25 at Signature Theatre, 4200 Campbell Ave., Arlington. Tickets are $40 to $95. Call 703-820-9771 or visit signature-theatre.org.
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