Jimmy Buffett's Escape to Margaritaville musical will give you a light buzz: EW review
Nick Maslow
Is it possible to make Jimmy Buffett music both sexy and funny in 2018? That’s apparently the goal of Escape to Margaritaville, a new musical featuring his hits that opens on Broadway at the Marquis Theatre on Thursday night. Unless you’ve never been in a dive bar and Instagram accounts for the majority of your cultural exposure, you’ll recognize early on the high degree to which Buffett’s music and lyrics inform the plot, ultimately with humorous and uplifting — but not-so-groundbreaking — results.
As Buffett’s real-life story goes, he started a multimillion-dollar empire singing about “wasting away” in sun-drenched locales, feeding a “carnivorous habit” with cheeseburgers, indulging in booze-drenched romance, and recovering from hangover-laden heartbreak in a bucket of beer. His fans — known as Parrotheads — can create their own blurry memories at Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville, a chain of restaurants, resorts, casinos, and retail shops where the Buffett lifestyle is just an American Express swipe away. All of it is presented with a middle-aged wink: This was designed for Baby Boomers who need a respite from the winter weather down south, who want to sing along to that hit they listened to while getting stoned on the beach in the ’70s. And when a random stay just isn’t enough, they can retire to a Margaritaville-branded senior living facility being developed in — you guessed it! — Florida.
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