BEFORE: It's four in a row for Taye Diggs, now that I added "Rent", and tonight I'm back behind the scenes of a Broadway play, just like in "She's Funny That Way". It's a fair bet there will be madcap relationships between the cast, right? I'm headed into the home stretch on romance-related material - there are still 10 films in the original chain but I think I'm going to postpone two of them, so really, there's just over a week to go before I can transition to something else.
THE PLOT: A failed Broadway singer who now works as a production manager must save opening night on his new production by wrangling his eccentric cast and crew.
AFTER: There's probably JUST enough relationship stuff here for me to justify including this in the romance chain, like the production manager who's still pining for the understudy he broke up with - they used to be singers together in a previous musical - and he still wants to know who she's dating now, and if he's still got a shot at getting back with her. Meanwhile backstage, a competition takes place between a different set of exes, to see who can sleep with the new dancer first (there's some debate over whether he's gay or straight, so why not wager on it?). Also, the star of the musical, who used to be in N'Sync, is probably sleeping with all of the chorus girls.
There's more going on that doesn't relate to romance, which is all about how crazy things can get when a Broadway musical opens - the washed-up actress playing the female lead gets hit on the head and can't perform, so the understudy has to fill in, which is a trope we've all seen many times, going back to the early days of film, at least to the movie "42nd Street" in 1933, and probably before that. (It's hard to Google where this movie trope started, exactly.) The director is high-strung and yells a lot, the stage manager is a shy woman with a stuttering problem, and the bass guitarist wants to get high before performing. There's probably a lot of stereotypes reflected there, plus the ones about all male dancers being gay or at least bi, so as a whole this feels like a story cobbled together from pieces of other stories, built on a foundation of mostly stereotypes and generalizations.
But the play-within-the-film is a nice idea, it's a musical revue featuring nothing but one-hit wonders, called "One Hit Wonderful". There have been so many musicals put together built around the music of Bob Dylan, Carly Simon, Tina Turner, Cher, Diana Ross, etc. and then there are the "cover version compilations" like "Rock of Ages" and "School of Rock", this seems like sort of a natural progression, and I wonder why nobody has ever done this before as a real stage musical. It's the thinnest possible slice of commonality to get songs like "I'll Melt With You", "Ice Ice Baby" and "Mambo #5" into the same production, but it could work. Umm, except those last two songs really suck - if they could include better songs, I'd consider going to see such a production IRL.
But so much of this is cornball, and we've seen it all before, in movies like "Noises Off", right? All they did was just dress up the idea of a behind-the-scenes farce with some music from the 80's and 90's. It's OK for wasting 90 minutes on Netflix, which kind of works out because you'd probably feel ripped off if you went to a movie theater and paid real money to watch this. But I also feel that in a few short months, I'll have forgotten all about this one.
Also starring Topher Grace (last seen in "Playing it Cool"), Alona Tal, Anne Heche (last seen in "A Simple Twist of Fate"), Rob Riggle (last seen in "Going the Distance"), Paul Scheer (last seen in "Long Shot"), JC Chasez, Lauren Lapkus (last seen in "Holmes & Watson"), Lesli Margherita, Brian Huskey (last seen in "A Futile and Stupid Gesture"), Zach Cregger, Johnny Ray Gill, Carlena Britch, Damian Gomez, Andrew Leland Rogers, Diego de Tovar.
RATING: 4 out of 10 clipboards
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