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NEW YORK TIMES GLORY DAYS REVIEW
Four Chums Grow Up but Still Meet in the Bleachers
by Ben Brantley
The new musical “Glory Days” may be the youngest-feeling show about being young ever to land on Broadway. Granted, this callow portrait of four friends on the cusp of manhood, which opened on Tuesday night at the Circle in the Square Theater, doesn’t have the raging hormonal current or electrified anguish that made teenage cult favorites out of “Spring Awakening,” “Rent” and, four long decades ago, “Hair.”
“Glory Days,” the maiden effort of Nick Blaemire (songs) and James Gardiner (book), is less about dangerous rebellion than about mild-mannered confusion. And it’s confusion as experienced not by sexually charged bohemians but by nice, nerdy middle-class kids struggling to understand why people grow apart as they grow up.
Directed by Eric Schaeffer, the show and its characters are gawky, sincere, tentative, self-contradictory and given to home truths that are expounded on as if they were discoveries of new planets. This means that the production manages to seem fresh and seriously stale at the same time.
Created by men in their early 20s (Mr. Blaemire is 23; Mr. Gardiner turned 24 last month) who began collaborating on it several years ago, “Glory Days” is the musical equivalent of a story for an introductory college fiction class, prompted by the directive “Write about what you know.” It belongs to a breed of works likely to evoke tears of pride and nods of recognition among friends and relatives of the writers. Average theatergoers will probably feel less indulgent.
First produced at the Signature Theater Company in Arlington, Va. (where Mr. Schaeffer is artistic director), “Glory Days” reunites four once-close-knit pals a year after their graduation from a high school where they were all social outcasts. There are Will (Steven Booth), sensitive and literary; Andy (Andrew C. Call), sensitive and stupid; Skip (Adam Halpin), sensitive and cynical; and Jack (Jessie J P Johnson), sensitive and secretive.
Now, having tasted college, they meet on the bleachers of the high school football field. (I presume you can imagine what Jim Kronzer’s simple, serviceable set looks like.) The choice of location is symbolic, since it was failing to make the football team that bonded them as pariahs years earlier. Will, who describes himself as the glue of the group, has devised a prank to humiliate key members of the popular crowd that spurned them.
For a while it looks as if “Glory Days” might turn into a singing version of “Revenge of the Nerds” or another of those assembly-line movies in which teenage losers get a bit of their own back. Certainly the show has some of the staples of that genre: fraternal teasing and roughhousing, idle boasts of sexual conquest, jokes about masturbation and the consumption of cheap beer.
But Mr. Blaemire and Mr. Gardiner are more interested in probing questions of identities in flux and the strength of friendships based on being outcasts together. So there are sweet-sounding, wandering pop ballads steeped in premature nostalgia (from Will); earnest personal confession (from Jack); resentful anger (via Andy); and cool disgust (from Skip, who sings about “a new world order: generation apathy”).
The actors are mercifully understated. They avoid being excessively cute or melodramatic. Unfortunately, they also avoid creating individually shaped personalities — I mean, as defined by more than bulging biceps or long hair — that register big onstage.
This may be appropriate for characters who have yet to figure out who they really are. But such blurriness rarely makes compelling theater. And the music captures the particular, poignant bond among these young men only in a couple of charming, wistful, close-harmony numbers. (Mr. Blaemire and Jesse Vargas did the vocal arrangements.)
It’s been a season of thinking small for the Broadway musical. Two front-runners for the Tony, “In the Heights” and “Passing Strange,” are also intimate, personal shows imported from non-Broadway houses. I can see why the producers of “Glory Days” might have thought this was an auspicious moment for a big-time New York transfer.
Ultimately, though, they have done this little, hopeful show no favors by dragging it into a spotlight that invites close and unforgiving inspection. I do find it heartening that a pair of enthusiastic and gifted young artists have fallen in love with that beleaguered form, the musical, as a means of self-expression.
The lyrics of Will’s concluding song is a humble expression of both the show’s limits and the possibility of something more substantial to come. He wants, he says, to tell a story that “can find a way to say/‘This is only who I am today’/And there’s so much more to see.”
GLORY DAYS
Music and lyrics by Nick Blaemire; book by James Gardiner; directed by Eric Schaeffer; sets by James Kronzer; costumes by Sasha Ludwig-Siegel; lighting by Mark Lanks; sound by Peter Hylenski; music director, Ethan Popp; vocal arrangements by Mr. Blaemire and Jesse Vargas; music contractor, Michael Keller; music supervision, arrangements and orchestrations by Mr. Vargas; production manager, Juniper Street Productions. Presented by John O’Boyle, Ricky Stevens, Richard E. Leopold, Lizzie Leopold, the Max Productions, Alan Mingo Jr. and Broadway Across America in association with the Signature Theater. Circle in the Square Theater, 235 West 50th Street, Manhattan, (212) 239-6200. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
WITH: Steven Booth (Will), Andrew C. Call (Andy), Adam Halpin (Skip) and Jesse J P Johnson (Jack).
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