Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

Belasco Theatre

New York

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A musical adaptation of Pedro Almodóvar’s film seemed poised for a buoyant leap to the stage, said Adam Feldman in Time Out New York. The 1988 movie, an Oscar-nominated relationship farce, “is a fount of zesty style” as exuberant as its Madrid setting. Its madcap plot conspires to eventually crowd into one apartment a sparring couple, a cabbie, a concierge, a fashion model who’s unwittingly begun an affair with a terrorist, and a Valium-laced bowl of gazpacho. Once it became clear that the adaptation would be handled by a well-regarded creative team and a “deluxe cast”—including Patti LuPone and Brian Stokes Mitchell—“Broadway mouths have been watering” in expectation.

Unfortunately, the production is “a sad casualty of its own wandering mind,” said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. Perhaps director Bartlett Sher was trying to channel Almodóvar’s sense of “romantic anarchy,” but the show becomes a barrage of scenes and songs that fail to stick because they’re all cut short. One might hold out hope that the “star-jammed” cast could inject some humanity into the chaos, but even they “can’t seem to keep their minds on the show.” And no wonder: The performers, and the score’s “oddly listless” songs, are constantly upstaged by an overly elaborate set that includes such bizarre elements as a conveyer-belt walkway and “highflying rope swings.”

If only someone had remembered that there was a point behind Almodóvar’s “exhilarating zaniness,” said Terry Teachout in The Wall Street Journal. At heart, Women on the Verge is a “wholly serious comedy about a macho culture that encourages men to be faithless to the women who love them.” The power of that idea is lost in the stage version because the production fails to make the women characters into “creatures of flesh and blood.” Stripped of its passion, the show we get is “the kind of been-there-seen-that musical that has been blighting Broadway for the past decade.”