There should be room on Broadway for a brash, boisterous musical that doesn't aspire to more than a few laughs and a good time.
But "Welcome to the Club," the new Cy Coleman-A.E. Hotchner musical, sets its sights low and delivers just that. If it weren't for Coleman's thoroughly professional score, "Welcome to the Club" would be the most horizontal musical in town.The setting is a New York alimony jail, and the subject is divorce. Four men and one woman - a country-western star not unlike Dolly Parton - languish in this prison for non-payment of alimony.
Hotchner, best known for his autobiography of Ernest Hemingway, has devised the most minimal of stories, a collection of stock situations that emphasize crude and rude stereotypes, not people.
There's the Jewish drugstore owner, played by the ever-mugging Avery Schreiber. His gorgon of a wife (Marilyn Sokol) wants his money so she can find happiness in Miami Beach. He plans to escape to Brazil where American law can't reach him.
Another member of the club is an insurance man whose wife suffers from "B-mania" caused by excessive shopping at such places as Bergdorf's, Bendel's, Bonwit Teller and B. Altman's.
Then there's the cynical writer getting back at his wife by putting her in his latest magazine article. And of course, the plot needs the naive young couple whose marriage is falling apart because of a meddling mother-in-law.
The best thing about "Welcome to the Club" is Coleman's score. The man who wrote "Sweet Charity," "Little Me" and "Barnum" is an expert craftsman, capable of the breeziest of melodies. If anything makes this musical move, it's the music.
His score is a series of pastiches that includes a country-western lament, a Rossinilike number for the entire cast, a sexy, double entendre song and one of those big, belting ballads - here called "The Name of Love" - that can rouse any audience to applause. Of the other numbers, a sweet love song called "At My Side" also lingers after the show. It is done with charming innocence by Scott Waara and Jodi Benson, the young lovers.
The show has been cast with strong performers. The classiest is Marcia Mitzman, playing the writer's ex-wife. She manages to project a sympathy that isn't apparent in the book. Terri White growls her way through the blues-tinged "Piece of Cake" and then doesn't have anything to do for the rest of the show.
Sally Mayes wails effectively as the country singer done wrong, and she has an amusing musical battle with Scott Wentworth as they sing about the merits and demerits of the North and South.
Hotchner's book collapses in Act 2, forcing Coleman to devise numbers that kill time rather than advance the plot. The ending also is unsatisfactory. For a musical about divorce, it's strange that almost everybody ends up back together at the final curtain.
Despite Coleman's flavorsome score, "Welcome to the Club" is a bargain-basement revue masquerading as a musical.
-IN OTHER NEW YORK REVIEWS, Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times that the play "offers less in the way of gritty domestic reality than most television commercials for leading headache remedies. Reflecting the absence of credible characters or drama or emotions, Hotchner's book dispenses with scenes and story for idle song cues."
"This show was a miscalculation from the very second it was conceived," wrote Howard Kissel in the Daily News. " . . . A full evening of spitefulness and recriminations is unimaginably gross."
Clive Barnes wrote in the New York Post: "There are just so many jokes or joke-variants available about wives, mothers-in-law, divorce and assorted marital unhappenings that Hotchner can make, and he probably makes most of them. But this remains a one-joke revue in search of a story."
Sid Goldberg of Scripps Howard News Service wrote that the show's book is the most serious flaw. "How serious a flaw? Picture the musical as Alaska and the script as the Exxon Valdez and you have an idea."