Annie Savoy, the Durham Bulls’s savviest fan, knows it. Crash Davis, the team’s sagacious catcher, knows it. Even Nuke LaLoosh, the club’s wild-armed, none-too-bright rookie pitcher, comes to know it.
You have to get out of your head, or the magic doesn’t happen.
Or as Annie and Crash would counsel Nuke: “Don’t aim the ball.”
The new musical “Bull Durham,” at the Paper Mill Playhouse, is adapted from the classic 1988 movie of the same name: a grown-up, rom-com paean to baseball, sex and male rivalry — the one with Susan Sarandon, Kevin Costner and Tim Robbins spending a minor-league season chasing wins while awash in pheromones.
In its stage form, “Bull Durham” comes across as not only deliberate but also miscalculated, as if its creators worried that the movie was a little too adult for a musical theater audience — a little too frankly sexual, a little too unabashedly intelligent — and they needed to dumb it down. They appear to be aiming it at a less sophisticated, more socially conservative crowd, rooted in some imaginary cornpone heartland.
That is odd for a couple of reasons, foremost that Ron Shelton, the movie’s writer and director, wrote the book for the musical, which has country-flavored songs by Susan Werner, who is also the lyricist. And Marc Bruni’s production does understand, if only to a degree, the importance of sexual sizzle. Carmen Cusack as Annie, the seductive Southern femme vitale, and Nik Walker, as the swaggering veteran Crash, have a tantalizingly simmering chemistry — and their performances are terrific, even arising from a defanged script.
For Bruni, who directed “The Great Gatsby” at Paper Mill before it went to Broadway, this is another big swing. But like Nuke’s undisciplined pitches, the storytelling in this musical is all over the place.
The plot remains largely the same: Two players new to the Bulls — Crash, who’s been to the major leagues and is nearing the end of his career, and Nuke, who has a “million-dollar arm” and is just beginning — vie for the affection of Annie, a beautiful baseball whiz. Because she has a thing for shaping wet lumps of clay, and because she is terrified of starting something real with Crash, she chooses Nuke and proceeds to tutor him. Because it’s part of his job, Crash teaches him, too. The Bulls’s fortunes rise with Nuke’s. Annie and Crash circle each other all season long.
Truth be told, Nuke has always been a tough sell as a character. If not for the unmistakable sparks between Robbins, who played him in the movie, and Sarandon, there’d have been no believing that Annie would pick Nuke, a barely housebroken puppy of a man-child, over Costner’s self-assured, Hollywood-handsome Crash.
The musical does not solve this problem by making Nuke (Will Savarese) a purely comic role, bordering on caricature. Almost the only thing he has going for him, attractiveness-wise, is that he can dance — which makes you wonder why, on the mound, he seems like he’s still growing into his gangly limbs.
Joshua Bergasse’s choreography is a dependably fun element of this production, particularly when the Bulls players and their bats are involved: lots of twirling and tossing. But that, too, works against the audience’s buy-in; these guys are crackerjack dancers, totally in sync, yet we need to believe this is a team that “ain’t scored any runs in three years.”
The stakes for the Bulls are weirdly lost in this iteration, and the menace underlying the hostility between Crash and Nuke has gone missing. As a musical, “Bull Durham” prefers hokeyness.
Starting with the upbeat, gospel opening song, “The Church of Baseball,” the production includes some charming numbers, and Derek McLane has provided a good-looking set, complete with the ballpark’s painted wooden bull. But too often the show stops us short, as when Crash sneer-sings that Annie, in a ruffled red dress with a plunging neckline, has “a look right outta Renaissance history.” Huh?
Or when the sexually experienced Millie (Ashlyn Maddox) wonders if she has the right to wear white at her wedding — a question that Annie, in the movie, dispatches with “Honey, we all deserve to wear white.” Here an entire song breaks out, involving them, the players’ wives and the wedding dress. (Costumes are by Alejo Vietti.) Not being a virgin “is no capital crime!” Annie sings, unnecessarily. Historical note: Yes, 1988 was the Reagan era, but it was also the Madonna era.
The greatest disappointment comes from the fate of Crash’s famous “I believe” monologue: the moment when he lays out his personal creed, with its idiosyncratic particulars on sex, literature, conspiracy, Scotch and baseball. It is an eruption of passion, and it makes sense that it would be turned into a song.
It is a profoundly underwhelming song, though, with sex and intellect mostly excised. He does still end it, as the Crash of the movie does, by professing his belief “in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days” — except that he also adds “warm” and specifies “three whole most delicious days.”
At that, Annie still breathes, “Oh my.” But really? The verbal overkill tilts it into eww.
As with much in this musical, it’s as if the “Bull Durham” allure — so obvious to the film’s admirers — had escaped the adapters’ comprehension.
Bull Durham
Through Nov. 2 at Paper Mill Playhouse, New Jersey; papermill.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.
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