The first rule of gambling: the house always wins.
But just who exactly is profiting from the movie-to-musical Honeymoon in Vegas? Not the producers, who I can’t imagine will make back their bet. Not audiences, who will rake in rather fewer laughs and less pizzazz than they anted up for. Not Jason Robert Brown, a gifted composer long in need of a jackpot. I guess Tony Danza, smooth as a poker table, slick as sin, comes out of it pretty well.
Honeymoon in Vegas played Paper Mill Playhouse in 2013 and on the strength of a rave review from the New York Times (Ben Brantley called it “delightfully unexpected” and “a swinging hymn to laid-back outrageousness”) upgraded to Broadway. Based on Andrew Bergman’s 1992 flick, it concerns Jack (Rob McClure), a nebbishy sort who’s promised his dead mother that he won’t marry, and Betsy (Brynn O’Malley), the schoolteacher shoving him toward the altar. The two jet to Vegas to finally say “I do,” but a professional gambler, Tommy (Danza), arranges for Jack to rack up heavy losses in a poker game and lend him Betsy, who reminds him of his dead wife, for the weekend.
You’d expect a Vegas-set show to be all glitz and glitter, but there’s something a little low-rent about Honeymoon, which stints on sets, on dance numbers and (until the finale) even on sequins. Are there really only two showgirls?
Director Gary Griffin keeps the wheels spinning, the dice rolling and the cards shuffling. Brown’s score is a jazzy riff on Rat Pack pastiche with the occasional ukulele lullaby wafted in for contrast. His lyrics teem with multisyllabic rhymes like Beyoncé/ fiancee. No complaints there. But it’s all in the service of a story that’s often uninvolving and sometimes a little distasteful.
Its gender politics are unreconstructed, with Jack having to prove his worth via the macho calamity of leaping from a plane in an Elvis jumpsuit and Betsy wholly defined by her almost pathological desire for a ring, a veil and a house in the suburbs. The show’s other women can be neatly divided into frump and slut – meet, for instance, Mahi, the Hawaiian woman who demands that Jack make “wet and sticky / Friki-Friki” with her. So, yeah, there’s maybe some racial stereotyping, too.
Perhaps you wouldn’t notice all this if you had anything riding on the central pair. But McClure, an able actor, plays the part at such a pitch of neurotic schlubbiness that who cares if he gets the girl? And though O’Malley is a fine, leggy singer with calf muscles that could crack lobster claws, her Betsy is so bereft of character that what does it matter if she’s gotten or not?
Yet through it all there’s Danza, effortlessly cool and obviously amused. His voice, thin and a little lunkish, is no great instrument, but he plays it like a jazz cat that’s got the cream. He can even put over a tender ballad about skin cancer. And he can tap-dance, too. Well, kind of. Ladies and gentlemen, this is what a high roller looks like.
