EVER since “Grease” set the scene, we’ve had ’50s nostalgia pastiche musicals (call them “nostiche”) on Broadway, some good, some not so good – “Hairspray” and “All Shook Up” among them.
The latest came last night with “Cry-Baby,” which, like “Hairspray,” is based on a John Waters movie about Baltimore in the pre-Beatles, Elvis-pelvis mid-’50s, those pre-Salk days when the disease of charitable choice was polio, and the teenage activity of dare was tongue-kissing.
“Cry-Baby” actually starts at an “anti-polio picnic” featuring free injections, feeble humor and awful music. Happily, it gets better from there (then again, there was nowhere to go but up).
It’s a Romeo and Juliet yarn about a poor little rich orphan, Allison (Elizabeth Stanley), and a bold and desperate rocker they call Cry-Baby (James Snyder) because, after his parents died, he couldn’t shed a tear.
Allison and Cry-Baby instantly fall in love. So much for the story, though book writers Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan, who co-wrote the book for “Hairspray,” have done a pretty nifty job with material not nearly so malleable.
Decidedly less nifty are the songs by David Javerbaum and Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger.
The music comes in two rocky flavors – cheery and droopy. It’s the kind of music that makes you wonder whether you’ve heard it before, just before you stop caring.
The edgy lyrics are altogether superior, more stupidly witty than amiably silly. As one of the show’s bad girls sings, “I can hold up a bank using only my face/I’m the nastiest creature you ever did see/On Halloween, I dress up as me.”
Director Mark Brokaw keeps the thing going and strikes the right Waters note of Day-Glo tattiness, but it’s left to Rob Ashford’s conventional but punchy choreography – including a good prison-break scene – to give the show any particular energy.
Scott Pask’s scenery and Catherine Zuber’s costumes ingeniously combine to carry bad taste – the so-bad-darling-it’s-good-you’ll-scream campery – with tasteful moderation.
The performances are unlikely to set the Styx on fire, but Snyder – looking like a squeaky-clean James Dean – sang well and was charming, if lacking a touch of sleaze, in the title role. Unfortunately, Stanley as the bubbly heroine who wants to be debubbled was little more than a cipher.
The clowns have the best of it. Chester Gregory II does a lovely Little Richard turn as Dupree, Alli Mauzey nuttily delights as Cry-Baby’s crazy fan, and Christopher J. Hanke makes a pompously square and nasty villain.
Best of all is Harriet Harris, an epitome of ditz, with a smile continually subsiding into a knowing leer, as Allison’s triumphantly arch grandmother with the imposing moniker of Mrs. Vernon-Williams.
It’s no “Hairspray” – it just doesn’t gel as well.
CRY-BABY
Marquis Theatre, 1535 Broadway; (212) 307-4100.