Cry-Baby

photo: Kevin Berne

I saw a half-priced early preview of Cry-Baby. It would have to get a hundred times better by opening night to be worth full price. There's plenty of athletic, high-energy dances for the boys in the chorus - Rob Ashford's choreography is easily the best thing about the show - and one person in the cast (Alli Mauzey) nails the trashy tacky-fabulous style of the John Waters movie that is the show's source material. No one else seems to have been asked to even try: the bland and unsexy musical - yet another set in the mid 1950's with the good girl falling for the bad (read: misunderstood) hip-swivelling rebel - not only lacks Waters' gleeful-weirdo personality, it lacks any personality at all. It's a dull and derivative Grease wannabe that always feels been-there and done-that-better-before.