WHAT'S the Polish word for fiasco?
Whatever it is, I'm not sure even it is adequate to describe the unique experience that is "Metro," the hit Warsaw musical that arrived on Broadway last night.
Here is a show that wants nothing more than to imitate "A Chorus Line," and where is it playing? Not just in New York City, but at the cavernous Minskoff, right across Shubert Alley from the theater where the original "Chorus Line" ran for only about 15 years! It's one thing to carry coals to Newcastle, but a whole coal mine?
Purportedly costing $5 million, this show is "A Chorus Line" as it might have been produced by the Festrunk brothers, those wild and crazy Eastern European swingers that Dan Aykroyd and Steve Martin used to play on "Saturday Night Live." Gloomy and jerky, "Metro" often looks as if it is taking its cues from a faded 10th-generation bootleg videocassette of the film version of its Broadway prototype, with a reel of "Hair" thrown in by mistake. The score, by Janusz Stoklosa, mixes fragments of ersatz Hamlisch with heavily miked Europop, though the music, too, sounds muted and distorted, as if in imitation of West European radio stations in the days when their signals still battled Soviet jamming on their way East. Should "Metro" be indicative of how our mass-cultural debris is filtering into the new Europe, America has a lot more to answer for than just Euro Disneyland.
Whatever it is, I'm not sure even it is adequate to describe the unique experience that is "Metro," the hit Warsaw musical that arrived on Broadway last night.
Here is a show that wants nothing more than to imitate "A Chorus Line," and where is it playing? Not just in New York City, but at the cavernous Minskoff, right across Shubert Alley from the theater where the original "Chorus Line" ran for only about 15 years! It's one thing to carry coals to Newcastle, but a whole coal mine?
Purportedly costing $5 million, this show is "A Chorus Line" as it might have been produced by the Festrunk brothers, those wild and crazy Eastern European swingers that Dan Aykroyd and Steve Martin used to play on "Saturday Night Live." Gloomy and jerky, "Metro" often looks as if it is taking its cues from a faded 10th-generation bootleg videocassette of the film version of its Broadway prototype, with a reel of "Hair" thrown in by mistake. The score, by Janusz Stoklosa, mixes fragments of ersatz Hamlisch with heavily miked Europop, though the music, too, sounds muted and distorted, as if in imitation of West European radio stations in the days when their signals still battled Soviet jamming on their way East. Should "Metro" be indicative of how our mass-cultural debris is filtering into the new Europe, America has a lot more to answer for than just Euro Disneyland.
