Saved

Saved

Playwrights Horizons

New York

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The 2004 film Saved! must have seemed a logical choice for musical conversion, said David Rooney in Variety. A cheeky satire on the dilemmas of evangelical Christian high schoolers, director Brian Dannelly’s big-screen debut was a pointedly witty critique of its chosen subculture. The cast of memorable characters was led by Mary, a chaste and devout senior who sleeps with her basketball-star boyfriend in hopes of “curing” him of homosexual thoughts. Unfortunately, composer Michael Friedman and librettists John Dempsey and Rinne Groff took a stultifyingly earnest approach to this adaptation. The result is a toothless “hybrid of High School Musical” and the recent off-Broadway hit Altar Boyz.

It’s fitting that the creators of Saved chose to omit the exclamation point from the stage show’s title, said Charles Isherwood in The New York Times. “Punctuation of any kind seems to have been removed from this bland, innocuous musical.” While Saved wants to show its Christian youths in resolute struggle with issues of “faith and identity, sex and love,” it comes across as market-tested and sickly sweet, like Legally Blonde with born-agains. The forgettable music and annoying lyrics seem to be mimicking the “up-with-Jesus sound of Christian radio,” and there are simply too many songs.

What nearly saves Saved is its performers, said Mark Peikert in the New York Press. Celia Keenan-Bolger, coming off her Tony-nominated performance in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, charms the audience as the shunned and searching Mary. Morgan Weed and Curtis Holbrook provide much-needed comic relief as the school’s outcasts, the fish-out-of-water Jewish girl Cassandra and the “angry, wheelchair-bound” Roland. As Hilary Faye, the holier-than-thou friend who sits in righteous judgment of her sinning schoolmate, Mary Faber gives the musical more than a sweetly menacing villain; she gives it a moral theme and hence a “reason to exist.” This may be a star-making performance, but even Faber can’t perform miracles.