With its title reminiscent of that very old standard “It Had to Be You,” the new musical It Shoulda Been You sounds like a retread even before it starts. The impression does not abate once you get a whiff of the plot, which recalls dozens of moldy domestic comedies. Watching it, I at various times thought of Take Her, She’s Mine; Mary, Mary; Norman, Is That You?; and the Forest Hills bridezilla section of Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite. Those plays, part of a genre that flourished in the 1950s and 1960s, were mostly throwbacks already. With their generation-gap humor and culture-clash antics, their mixed marriages and children gone amok, they harked back at least as far as 1922, to the enormous hit Abie’s Irish Rose, which Robert Benchley described even then as having “the comic spirit of 1876.”A musical in that antique vein would seem to be a nonstarter now.
- 4/15/2015
- by Jesse Green
- Vulture
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