There may be no more apt title for the uniquely maddening, innately risky venture that is crafting a new stage musical than “Safety Not Guaranteed.”
As composer Ryan Miller pointed out this month — during a speech on the show’s opening night at Signature Theatre in Arlington — musical theater ventures often devolve into years-long slogs that never yield a stageable production. The mere decision to embark on such an endeavor takes bravery and maybe a little insanity. To navigate all the meetings and readings and workshops necessary to mount a musical is a feat in fortitude. Finally getting that show onstage requires exhaustive collaboration.
So it’s something of a marvel that two (fairly) new musicals — “Safety Not Guaranteed” at Signature and “Chez Joey” at Arena Stage — are dazzling on D.C.-area stages.
The shows are undeniably different. “Safety,” an adaptation of a 2012 film that charmed the Sundance Film Festival, is a sleek, one-act indie-rock musical about quirky loners wrestling with regret. “Chez Joey,” a radical reimagining of the 1940 musical “Pal Joey” (that does, in fact, bill itself as a “new musical” on the script’s title page), is an entrancing song-and-dance spectacular powered by a couple of homegrown stars. Together, they speak to the form’s unbridled breadth.
Though perfectly charming, the “Safety Not Guaranteed” movie — written by Derek Connolly and directed by Colin Trevorrow — was a tad slight. Avoiding the unwieldy imitation of many screen-to-stage adaptations, the “Safety” stage show feels like the inevitable end point for material that greatly benefited from adding librettist Nick Blaemire’s deft writing and Miller’s stirring songs. Now, once-flimsy character moments and plot beats stand straight.
The show’s skeleton still resembles the movie: When a slacker magazine writer spots a classified ad from someone searching for a time-travel partner, he enlists a couple of interns for a road trip to track down the guy. But as intern Darius (a revelatory Mia Pak) forges a bond with that standoffish oddball, Kenneth (Gunnar Manchester), a sweet tale of outsider camaraderie unfolds.
I didn’t catch the show’s 2024 world premiere, which gleaned mixed reviews at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Whatever kinks plagued that iteration, the Signature mounting seems to have mended them.
Featuring a new director (Oliver Butler) and fresh cast, this production turns both the Darius-Kenneth relationship and middle-aged journalist Jeff’s (Preston Truman Boyd) reunion with a high school fling (Erin Weaver) into moving reflections on that universal desire to relive the past and correct mistakes of old. Along the way, the ethereal, head-bobbing songs from Guster singer-songwriter Miller offer reliable jolts — particularly the shot-out-of-a-cannon opener “Architects and Engineers,” the wrenching showstopper “Chocolate Milk” and the rousing finale, “One Man Wrecking Machine.”
“Chez Joey,” meanwhile, takes its cues from the Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart musical “Pal Joey.” (For the unfamiliar: Hart was Rodgers’s pre-Oscar Hammerstein collaborator expertly portrayed by Ethan Hawke in the film “Blue Moon.”) Yet book writer Richard Lagravenese so comprehensively transformed the show that it’s not even billed as a revival. Although some tunes from “Pal Joey” endure — “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” wasn’t going anywhere — this version is more of a Rodgers-and-Hart jukebox musical, peppered with standards such as “The Lady Is a Tramp” (from “Babes in Arms”) and “This Can’t Be Love” (from “The Boys From Syracuse”).
Co-directed by actor Tony Goldwyn and visionary choreographer Savion Glover, “Chez Joey” is the rare conceptual overhaul that so snugly fits the material that you labor to imagine it being done any other way. By changing Joey (Tony winner Myles Frost) to a Black character and setting this tale in 1940 Bronzeville — a South Side Chicago neighborhood known as “Black Metropolis” — Lagravenese and his collaborators shrewdly upped the ante. Now, Joey’s climb from a spotlight-craving emcee to a nightclub-running impresario is anchored in a thorny negotiation of Black artistry and ownership.
When I attended last month’s opening-night performance, “Chez Joey” did stumble through some Act 1 pacing issues — the plot takes too long to coalesce — and the occasional superfluous number. But after local standout Awa Sal Secka steals the first act with staggering renditions of “Where’s That Rainbow?” and “My Funny Valentine,” Frost (a Silver Spring native) hypnotically taps and slides and splits his way to many a well-deserved ovation after intermission.
Of course, success stories wouldn’t hit the same if we didn’t also get noble misfires. Take “Little Miss Perfect,” Joriah Kwamé’s new musical that recently wrapped its run at Olney Theatre Center. Born out of TikTok fame, the world premiere was a diverting enough production buoyed by some catchy tunes and winning performances. (Leanne J. Antonio, Mia Goodman and Graciela Rey are talents to watch.) Still, the road from online virality to onstage reality was a bumpy one for a show that too often turns to tropes and overstuffs its songbook.
So let’s relish the two triumphs still running on area stages as the unicorns that they are. If there’s one thing for certain in musical theater, it’s that nothing is guaranteed.
Safety Not Guaranteed, through April 12 at Signature Theatre in Arlington. About 1 hour 45 minutes. sigtheatre.org.
Chez Joey, through Sunday at Arena Stage in Washington. About 2 hours 30 minutes. arenastage.org.
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