Nice Work If You Can Get It

Imperial Theatre, New York

(212) 239-6200

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It’s a shame that people go for this kind of “bargain-basement jabberwocky,” said Rex Reed in The New York Observer. This musical subjects numerous tunes by George and Ira Gershwin to the chore of carrying a fractured, unfunny Prohibition-era farce, but audiences seem to enjoy it immensely, and last week it was nominated for 10 Tony Awards. Can’t anyone see that this show is just a dumping ground for every musical cliché in the book? Ostensibly written by Joe DiPietro, the story is actually pulled from the “threadbare material” in Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse’s 1926 musical Oh, Kay! The result is “so vulgar, boring, and stupid” that its good reception only proves how much audiences’ standards have declined.

Or maybe the audience has simply noticed that “the show is as charming in execution as it is disheartening in theory,” said Elysa Gardner in USA Today. Nice Work certainly isn’t original, but director Kathleen Marshall has mounted its clichés with “disarming spirit and skill.” Matthew Broderick is every inch the “sweetly deadpan social doofus” as a playboy who inconveniently falls for Kelli O’Hara’s adorable bootlegger. Blessed with a gorgeous soprano voice, O’Hara “proves once again that there’s pretty much nothing she can’t do onstage.”

Yet even an homage to the light musicals of the Jazz Age must meet certain overall standards, said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. In that era, “outlandish plots were mere pegboards for songs, dances, gags, and idiosyncratic star turns.” But such a show requires a “sassy, go-for-broke momentum,” which Marshall’s staging never musters. Occasionally “a bubble of pure, tickling charm” rises to the surface, as when the gun-toting O’Hara sings “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and when she and Broderick fall for each other to the tune of “’S Wonderful.” But that accounts for “perhaps 15 minutes of a show that runs 150.” The rest is a languid affair that, despite the cast’s laudable efforts, fails to connect with “the whimsy of a bygone genre.”