Happiness 4/5

Well, between Happiness and Next To Normal, I can safely say that just because something moves you to tears doesn’t mean that it’s good. I wouldn’t go so far as to say Happiness is bad (although the commercial reviews would suggest otherwise), it’s just not great. I can’t really explain the shows shortcomings without exposing its plot, so if you don’t want to know the major plot twist, best to stop reading now.

A group of people find themselves trapped in a subway car and must choose the perfect moment from their lives. Upon choosing, they are released from the train car and live in that moment for perpetuity. Yes, the writers make use of some pretty clichéd scenarios to manipulate you emotionally - first baseball game with your dad, waiting at the hospital bed of your dying lover, pledge of love to a doomed soldier - but they do the job. The problem is that about half of the passengers’ stories are just not as well written / musically interesting as the other half. So after about the fifth story, I was left wondering, “I get it - live life to the fullest, don’t take your time on earth for granted, stop and smell the roses - yadda, yadda, yadda...but so what?” It was like reading a book of Stephen King’s short stories; the first couple are interesting, but then you get kind of bored and have to put it down. Same thing here, but I couldn’t leave since the show is nearly two hours with no intermission.

The huge cast of prominent musical theatre vets (Hunter Foster, Sebastian Arcelus, Joanna Gleason) do wonderful work elevating the material above clichéd treacle, but in the end I was left wondering if there was a point to this meta-physical exercise. Perhaps it would have been more interesting to examine the idea of re-living the same event forever. Would you get bored? What if you chose the wrong moment? What if your memory of that moment was different from what actually happened? And although the subway conductor’s situation was summed up in a song, it might have been interesting to explore how he copes with his job. How can he perpetually watch others discover their perfect moment when he’s stuck in a subway car forever? To me, exploring these questions would have added some needed depth to the Lifetime “movie-of-the-week” feeling of the whole project. Granted, sometimes I am in the mood for a Lifetime Channel tearjerker, but I was hoping for something more considering the writing team’s previous Broadway outing brought us the emotionally complex Grey Gardens.

The set, an ever revolving subway car - the passengers should have known something was up just by the sparkling, pristine car - and ever changing backdrops were effectively used to create several different locations and eras. Choreographer/director, Susan Stroman, uses the small space effectively and efficiently given the large cast size. For $21 TDF tickets, it was well worth seeing this top notch cast. And truly not a bad way to spend a Sunday afternoon. It just seemed like a wasted opportunity to explore some interesting notions of what constitutes happiness and our ideas of the afterlife.