Dogfight

Second Stage Theatre,

New York, (212) 246-4422

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Flawed though it may be, this “touching, small-scale musical” is part of a heartening trend, said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter. Far too many shows—think Sister Act, Ghost, and Bring It On—take a blockbuster film and treat it “less as a story than a brand to be tapped.” But there’s another breed of stage adaptation that’s emerging: the well-crafted chamber musical. The latest example is Dogfight, a reimagining of a 1991 Lili Taylor–River Phoenix film that “mirrors many of the movie’s minor-key virtues.” The pacing is sometimes sluggish, and when composer Benj Pasek strives for “Sondheim-ish dissonance,” his music feels strained. But there’s also “a facility for intimate storytelling” on display that serves the central romance well.

Be warned: That romance evolves from “one of the nastiest boy-meets-girl setups” ever created, said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. In 1963, as three Marines prepare to ship off to Vietnam, they decide to hold a “dogfight”—competing to see who can find the ugliest date to bring to a party. The girl whom Cpl. Eddie Birdlace chooses—a plump, shy waitress named Rose—doesn’t realize she’s the butt of a joke. Unfortunately, the play proceeds in a “slightly hesitant trickle,” as if “apologizing for any unpleasantness.” The pivotal scene in which Rose learns about the bet “needs to be savagely painful.” Instead, it’s “largely toothless.”

By the second act, the play becomes about “seeing through the contradictions in people,” said Rex Reed in The New York Observer. Eddie tries to make amends with Rose, and as his macho swagger fades, the romance is affectingly depicted: Derek Klena captures Eddie’s complexities, while Lindsay Mendez makes her character “a very special person trapped in a life of excess baggage.” In the final scene, when Eddie returns to Rose as the only one of the Marines who survived the war, the looks on their faces “tell a thousand epilogues, any one of which could melt the coldest heart.”