There are many who say that Broadway has been taking pointers from Vegas lately. But the new musical “Scandalous: The Life and Trials of Aimee Semple McPherson” has its eye on another entertainment capital: Branson, Mo.
Book writer and lyricist Kathie Lee Gifford tells the story of the superstar evangelist in the bland, straightforward way usually associated with that Midwestern city. Those expecting a kitschy train wreck — Kathie Lee’s writing a musical! — may be disappointed, because “Scandalous” isn’t disastrous. It’s merely monotonous.
The plot follows McPherson’s life from cradle — “It all started in Canada, when I was 6 weeks old,” McPherson (Carolee Carmello) informs us — to grave.
Two-and-a-half hours and 27 numbers later, “Aimee died of an accidental overdose of barbiturates,” her mother, Minnie (Candy Buckley), states plainly.
The intervening 54 years are action-packed, with McPherson building a religious empire in the 1920s and ’30s. The spunky little dynamo also found the time to have three husbands — two of them played by the well-toned Edward Watts. No wonder she popped pills to keep going.
Everything is spelled out for us in a painfully obvious way, while the show simultaneously shies from the most spectacular aspects of McPherson’s career. This is a biomusical of someone who began as a faith healer and spoke in tongues, yet we don’t see any of that. Did Gifford think it’d freak out a New York audience?
On the other hand, we are treated to the tired Broadway cliché of the brassy, sassy African-American belter. Roz Ryan does what she can — and she can do a lot — as former madame Emma Jo, who ends up as McPherson’s assistant, but the part’s thankless. Similarly, George Hearn (“Sunset Boulevard,” “La Cage aux Folles”) is wasted in the dual parts of McPherson’s father and a rival preacher.
At least “Scandalous” delivers sample-size tastes of the evangelist’s kitschy, Cecil B. DeMille-type sermons. A memorable scene involves Adam and Eve in flesh-colored body stockings, and a sequined apple.
A musical-theater trouper, Carmello — last seen as the Mother Superior in “Sister Act” — finally gets the starring role she’s been waiting for, and carries the show with go-for-broke energy. Sadly, she has a lot to do, but little to work with.
Indeed, the score by Gifford and composers David Pomeranz and David Friedman is so innocuous that at times you don’t even register that the actors have switched from speaking to singing. The one standout is the gently swinging “It’s Just You,” which you can picture Michael Bublé humming in the shower.
Carmello throws herself into the songs — her powerful final anthem, “I Have a Fire,” probably resonates over the entire tri-state area — but the material is undistinguished at best. “Why am I the fated daughter of such pompous piety?” she sings, setting up a strained rhyme. “Why must I be forced to swallow such religi-osity?”
Let’s just treat that as a rhetorical question.