The songs were the biggest disappointment... a hodgepodge of Weill, Coward, Sondheim and Gilbert and Sullivan. I found them serviceable at the beginning but there were far too many of them and they stopped the action of the story short. They seemed to bet better as the show went on but I think I might have been responding to the genuinely interesting vocal arrangements that make an appearance in the latter half of the show. There are some good voices in the show which is a pleasant surprise.
Then there's the acting, mostly shouted and screeched. The music hall proscenium, stage within the stage, gives it a defensible context to occur in but it didn't stop the performance style from being an onslaught of mugging with too few moments of reflection or calm that might have given the show some texture. And default British caricatures that like the pastiche music mix British and American ideas of wealth and class but successfully nail down or satirize neither.
To be fair, the acting fits in well with the sledgehammer book and lyrics which are far from lazy in their attempt at double-entendres and topsy turveydom but nearly all of them miss their mark by a wide gap. The performing is also not lazy, Jefferson Mays and Bryce Pinkham are working up a real sweat for each performance.
Darko Tresnjak, a director whose work I've admired, makes it all go by quickly and there are production tricks that are a lot of fun. But I have to lay much of the blame at his Tresnjak's feet. I wonder if the production was as relentless shrill when it played at Hartford Stage or is it the Broadway disease that turns a fair to middling work like GENTLEMAN into something that wants so aggressively to be entertaining that it ends up doing the opposite.
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