There’s a giant pileup at the Belasco Theatre, where “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” opened last night. The show is flashy, breathless, busy. It’s a mess, but it’s a big, fun Technicolor mess.
Flinging itself forward with desperate energy, this new musical never coagulates into a coherent whole. Luckily, many of its parts are vastly entertaining.
That’s the least we could have expected from the reunion of those two Tony winners from “Gypsy,” Patti LuPone and Laura Benanti, and from David Yazbek, whose scores for “The Full Monty” and “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” are gems.
We put up with a lot when there’s talent like this around.
The show faithfully adapts Pedro Almodovar’s 1988 comedy, down to the garish ’80s costumes and Madrid setting (leading to haphazard Spanish accents).
But the movie is built on a series of scenes unevenly strung together, and book writer Jeffrey Lane followed it closely. The result is like standing by an intersection: Traffic whizzes by, pausing only for the occasional red light/song.
At the center of this whirlwind is Pepa (a strangely ineffectual Sherie Rene Scott), who spends the whole show chasing Ivan (Brian Stokes Mitchell), the aging Lothario who just dumped her via answering machine. There’s little point in trying to sum up the rest of the frantic action, which consists mostly of the kooky shenanigans of colorful characters that include Ivan’s stalker ex, Lucia (LuPone, good but underused), and his geeky, stuttering son, Carlos (“American Idol” runner-up Justin Guarini).
The action hurtles along more or less smoothly, though the staging by Bartlett Sher (“South Pacific”) is surprisingly clunky at times. A trick literally backfires when an acrid stink follows an onstage blaze — not the best ad for a high-profile Lincoln Center Theater production.
Admittedly, the film hasn’t aged well, and Lane should have followed its stylish, oddball spirit rather than its letter. As it is, the biggest change is Ivan’s increased presence, which is a terrible decision. This thing is called “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” for good reason.
Luckily, the show also has serious assets. Chief among them is Benanti, who brings the slightly dim, skimpily dressed Candela to outrageous, hilarious life. Benanti milks the lamest lines to the max, whips up laughs out of thin air and slays with a song, “Model Behavior,” that consists of a series of frantic phone messages delivered at lightning speed.
Though it lacks a proper closing number, Yazbek’s score is full of wonderful, witty little nuggets, often assigned in a counterintuitive manner. You wouldn’t expect LuPone to be a good fit for a ’60s Brill Building pastiche like “Time Stood Still,” but she sounds terrific. She also puts just enough belt into the deceptively slow-burning “Invisible” to give it a jolt.
“Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” is far from perfect. But there’s enough going on to see this particular glass of gazpacho as half-full.