First, a rhetorical question: don’t these Broadway big shots have any common sense or critical self-perception? Making a musical out of Simon’s 1977 movie was, if not an immediately lousy idea, certainly a perilous one. Things change fast in this kaleidoscope culture, including our neuroses: the collision of two unstable showbiz personalities in the New York cyclotron worked OK 15 years ago, but it needed updating badly. It hasn’t gotten it. So Paula (Peters), the struggling dancer, is forever being deserted by the creeps she shacks up with. These days, that problem wouldn’t even get her on Sally Jessy, let alone Oprah. So Elliot (Short), the struggling actor who comes to share her apartment, turns out to be not a creep but a nice guy, and both swap struggling for snuggling. Well, good for Paula, but not good for the show, which fights to keep expiring from terminal innocuousness, and loses.
Simon, whose recent plays have forsaken shtik for poignance and edge, has here, with perverse precision, jettisoned all the grit and wit from his original screenplay. Hamlisch’s uninspired score doesn’t sound like the composer of “A Chorus Line.” Lyricist David Zippel brings forth prodigies like “Sondheimlich maneuver”-careful, David, Steve Sondheim may take back his rhyming dictionary. Director Michael Kidd and musical stager Graciela Daniele have one funny number, in which Paula struggles to keep up with the youthful dancers hurtling about her. But the show reaches depths of desperation in numbers that feature dancing snacks, capering caddies and-the nadir of bankruptcy-a parody of TV aerobics guru Richard Simmons.
The incandescent sincerity of Peters glows in this void, a void that Short leaps into with manic intensity. Short cavorts, frolics, gambols, climbs the walls, plays in the nude with a guitar for a fig leaf, smiles, grins, laughs, meditates, mugs, minces (in a drag version of “Richard III”)-the guy is a chunk of human plutonium trying to fission himself into enough energy to skyrocket the show. In a romantic rooftop scene he wows Peters with impressions of Bogart, Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart. How many ’90s New York girls would be wowed by this? Let’s see, one, two … no, the second one moved to Cleveland. The audience (most of them) loves Short, which is only right: he spends more time wooing them than smooching Peters. Short is so strenuously nice that he makes niceness seem like a bizarre affliction. Still, with the right vehicle, Short could be a new Robert Morse, a jet-propelled Puck. “The Goodbye Girl” isn’t that vehicle. With the American musical in deep trouble, some of its biggest names have let it down. But hey, it’s got a $10 million advance.
