Coram Boy

photo: Joan Marcus

Imported from London and based on the book for teenagers, Coram Boy is entertaining, brilliantly staged, overwrought crap. It's the stage equivalent of a page-turner - one sensationalized event after another at dizzying speed - but it lacks thematic substance and weight; in the end it's just a series of melodramatic, pulped-up moments, a cheesey soap opera in Masterpiece Theatre dress. For what it is, it's fun and ocassionally snortworthy - you'll hiss the baby-snatching villians, you'll ooh and aah the Flying By Foy, and you may even find you're misty-eyed (I wasn't) at the big eleventh hour emotional moment when some measure of happiness is found after nearly three hours of faux-Dickensian injustices - but you'll leave humming the stagecraft.