Did Broadway Critics Have Fun, Fun, Fun at Beach Boys Tuner Good Vibrations?

Good Vibrations, directed and choreographed by John Carrafa, brings the music of the Beach Boys to the Broadway stage. The show, which had a public workshop last summer at Vassar College, officially opened at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre on February 2. Did critics have fun, fun, fun?

Here is a sampling of what they had to say:

William Stevenson in his Broadway.com Review: "The first half is embarrassingly bad. The dialogue is so lame that it's a wonder Richard Dresser whose plays include Rounding Third left his name on the credits as the book-writer. Setting the scene at the beginning, one character says: 'The girls were beautiful. The guys were cool. Everybody surfed.' And the clichés just keep on coming for over two hours. Combined with Carrafa's tacky choreography and the terrible set in which four chairs are used to simulate a car, the show seems more like a high school production than a big-budget Broadway musical... Whenever the actors are allowed to stop their frenetic dancing and just sing, there are actually some good numbers. That's because there are talented singers in the cast... The audience for this waterlogged musical should be limited to Beach Boys diehards, unsuspecting tourists and the actors' family and friends. Casting agents might want to go too, because there are talented singers here who in all likelihood will need another, better gig very soon."

Ben Brantley of The New York Times: "Even those who believe everything on this planet is here for a purpose may at first have trouble justifying the existence of Good Vibrations, the singing headache that opened last night at the Eugene O'Neill Theater. But audience members strong enough to sit through this rickety jukebox of a show, which manages to purge all catchiness from the surpassingly catchy hits of the Beach Boys, will discover that the production does have a reason to be, and a noble one: Good Vibrations sacrifices itself, night after night and with considerable anguish, to make all other musicals on Broadway look good... Good Vibrations... features a lot of washboard-stomached performers who give the impression of having spent far more time in the gym than in the rehearsal studio. As they smile, wriggle and squeak with the desperation of wet young things hung out to dry, you feel their pain. It is unlikely, however, to be more acute than yours... Every element in the show appears to have been cribbed in haste, as if on the morning of a final exam, from other, more agreeable musicals of the jukebox/pop pastiche genre, which is gradually devouring all of Broadway... From its cutely clichéd script which begins, 'Once upon a time there was a far-off land called California' to its haphazard choreography, the show feels as if it simply gave up on trying to figure out the balance of nostalgia and satire that can make this kind of show-biz exercise profitable."

Clive Barnes of The New York Post: "Despite the almost manic enthusiasm of a youthful cast covering well-known standards from the Wilson/Beach Boys song- book, the show remains beached... For Beach Boy nostalgia buffs--and I count myself among them--the score is pretty good. I might have chosen different songs, but any show that has 'Wouldn't It Be Nice' can't be all bad. But the book!... John Carrafa, the director and choreographer of Good Vibrations, is hardly in [Movin' Out director/choreographer Twyla] Tharp's league--they're scarcely playing the same game. As for Richard Dresser's drab book, it almost disappears into Heidi Ettinger's ugly settings and Jess Goldstein's conventional costumes."

Howard Kissel of The New York Daily News: "It's just depressing that the apparent model for musicals nowadays is Mamma Mia!, which attached a feebly written plot to the songs of ABBA. The implication is that musicals are a kind of living jukebox, where people are so happy to hear music they love that they will put up with plots that make the average sitcom seem like great drama. Here, an unusually contrived plot is woven around the cheery music of the Beach Boys. Initial reports indicated that the material was so awful it might be fun. But it isn't. It's just bland... The thinking seems to have been that the music would carry everything along with it. Sad to say, except for occasional harmonic passages, the music is not performed with enough gusto to achieve the desired effect. Given the synthetic nature of everything about this show, wouldn't it have been cheaper and more effective to play the actual Beach Boys tracks and have the cast lip-sync? The actors go through their paces brightly, but the overall effect, matching the material, is hollow. John Carrafa's choreography does not brighten the proceedings. The steps tend to be repetitive."

David Rooney of Variety: "Thanks to the enduring buoyancy of the songs and to a vocally capable, youthful cast that is attractive, energetic and bares a lot of skin, this isn't quite the history-making train wreck trumpeted in advance by the bad vibrations emanating from its troubled previews. Even within the frame of jukebox tuners, it doesn't approach the staggering tedium of the Burt Bacharach-Hal David songbook show The Look of Love, which dispensed with its book during development and opted for a pedestrian revue format. But that comparison is by no means a recommendation.... [Good Vibrations is] a musical so inane it makes its obvious model, Mamma Mia!, look like Sunday in the Park With George. This is not just cheesy, it's Velveeta cheesy, spread thick on white bread."

Michael Kuchwara of The Associated Press: "We're not looking for depth, but a minimum amount of 'Fun, Fun, Fun,' would have been nice in Good Vibrations, the bland new jukebox musical overloaded with more than 30 songs from the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson. As it is, the show, which opened Wednesday at Broadway's Eugene O'Neill Theatre, proves that pop classics alone can't make musical theater—especially when accompanied by a sketchy, almost nonexistent plot, lame wit and meager character development... There is a desperate quality to Good Vibrations with its insistence on cramming as many numbers as possible into the show. The cast of energetic young folk works frantically to deliver these songs, which include just about every big Beach Boys hit... Yet after a while, as good as the songs are, they begin to sound alike. That's because they often are delivered in the cheerfully anonymous manner of a cruise-ship revue. And, despite the obvious miking, many of the lyrics are lost. The performers exude an all-American geniality that doesn't allow for much quirkiness or individuality. [Kate] Reinders comes off best, displaying a perky manner and comic timing not undone by Dresser's dim tale."

Elysa Gardner of USA Today: "A diverting, if sometimes irritating, two hours, thanks to the synergy between an energetic young cast and a reliable old master. The latter would be principal Beach Boys songwriter Brian Wilson, whose achingly bittersweet songs have led rock critics to deem him the Mozart of their genre. Given the attitudes those critics harbor toward musicals, attitudes that tend to range from sneering to willfully ignorant, I'm guessing that many will be surprised by how well Wilson's tunes are served in this production. They shouldn't be; the intricate, keening melodies and lush harmonies driving classics such as 'God Only Knows,' 'In My Room' and 'Warmth of the Sun' are the sort of stuff theatrically trained singers can handle more readily than a lot of their pop peers—and without the benefit of pitch correction. To their credit, the actors seem to realize they're serving as glorified disc jockeys, tossing out lines that either set up songs or allude to them; and they deliver with a wink and a shrug."

Linda Winer of Newsday: "Good Vibrations shoehorns the songs into Richard Dresser's generic coming-of-age hodgepodge about blue-collar East Coast high-school graduates on their way to a surfin' safari. The aggressively charmless adventure begins with a character exclaiming, as if someone actually believed this to be a clever start, 'Once upon a time, there was a far off land called California....' Admirers of John Carrafa's choreography for such witty shows as Urinetown, not to mention his formative years as a Tharp dancer, cannot help but be dismayed by the thud emanating from his direction and choreography... The city on the East Coast, wherever that may be, is dark and the surfer beach doesn't look much sunnier. The onstage combo appears to be performing from the back of a truck. Heidi Ettinger's set is a noncommittal collage of surfer imagery that finally explodes into a dazzling ocean night. There are lots and lots of costumes by Jess Goldstein, but the surfer girls look like hookers and the period fashions are insistently vague."