The fun begins long before the skydiving Elvis impersonators show up in “Honeymoon in Vegas,” the delightfully ditzy new musical based on the ’92 Nicolas Cage-Sarah Jessica Parker film. Now getting its world premiere in New Jersey, possibly en route to Broadway, it lands you in Rat Pack territory as soon as the orchestra launches into the jazzy, brassy overture.
Jason Robert Brown’s bouncy score accompanies the gag-filled book by Andrew Bergman, who also wrote and directed the film, about the marriage-phobic Jack (Rob McClure) and his long-suffering girlfriend, Betsy (Brynn O’Malley).
It’s not that Jack doesn’t want to do the right thing. It’s that he can’t: His very Jewish mother, Bea (Nancy Opel), made him promise that he would, as she puts it in her hilarious deathbed song, “Never Get Married.”
The trouble begins when Jack impulsively proposes anyway and whisks Betsy off to Vegas for a quickie wedding. There they encounter the dashing Tommy Korman (Tony Danza, in the role James Caan played in the film), a gambler still pining for his late wife. Betsy, it seems, is a dead ringer for Tommy’s beloved, and he’s determined to have her.
After luring Jack into a high-stakes poker game and scamming him to the tune of $58,000, Tommy’s “Indecent Proposal”-style solution is to forgive Jack’s debt if Betsy agrees to spend the weekend in Hawaii with him. By this point, Betsy is so infuriated that she agrees, just to teach Jack a lesson.
It’s a flimsy premise, to be sure, but successful musicals have been built on less. And this one works, thanks to such wacky elements as a scantily clad harpist who plays her instrument with her breasts and, of course, those skydiving Elvises, depicted here by puppets on wires.
As McClure proved last year in Broadway’s “Chaplin,” he’s terrific at physical comedy, and here he also mines big laughs with his increasingly manic line readings. The lissome O’Malley (late of “Annie”) brings real charm to her role, and Opel and Matthew Saldivar are a riot as, respectively, the Jewish mother who keeps popping up after her death and Tommy’s buffoonish henchman, Johnny Sandwich (“I changed it from Focaccia,” he explains).
But it’s Danza — still boyishly handsome at 62 — who has the audience eating out of the palm of his hand. His timing is razor-sharp, his crooning pleasant, and his soft-shoe dancing smooth as he makes you root for Tommy despite his thoroughly despicable behavior.
As for Brown’s old-fashioned Broadway-style score, it’s both tuneful and witty. As Jack sings in the opening number:
“I like dancing on the pier / I like Broadway (once a year) / But I love Betsy! / I like visits to the zoo / I like opera (that’s not true!) / But I love Betsy!”
“Honeymoon in Vegas” could well succeed on Broadway, especially if director Gary Griffin punches up the occasionally sluggish pace. It’s the kind of silly, fun musical you’d want to take your mother to . . . unless, of course, you’re hoping to get married.