Seattle Critics Get to Know Broadway-Bound Wedding Singer

The Wedding Singer will arrive at Broadway's Al Hirschfeld Theatre in March, teased hair and all. But before it makes it to Gotham, the show is having its world premiere at Seattle's 5th Avenue Theatre, the same place another big screen-to-stage musical, Hairspray, was born. Did the new tuner give local critics something to sing about?

Here is a sampling of what they had to say:

Lynn Jacobson of Variety: "[Benanti and Lynch] exude a kind of wholesome niceness that comes across as almost bland; they're attractive, but we never see the idiosyncrasies that mark them for each other. It's hard to say from the outside whether this is a problem of casting, direction, or writing… The show gets off to a rambling start, eating up the clock with comic asides such as a man's inebriated wedding toast, and Robbie's grandma Rosie Rita Gardner tunefully recalling the indiscretions of her youth. This is time that would be well spent bonding the audience to Robbie and Julia and their best friends, the characters at the heart of the play… The second half of the show is tighter than the first."

Misha Berson of The Seattle Times: "[The Wedding Singer] has some winning musical segments, likable performers and a stream of '80s quips, gags, fads and foibles. What the musical lacks is some showstopping star power. Also, the pop-culture-heavy script seems designed for those who know the difference between Bon Jovi and Van Halen, Pac-Man and Ferris Bueller. At 2 ½ hours it toils vigorously but sometimes at cross-purposes, trying to mesh a sweetly goofy love story and a cruder comic grab bag.... [The score] kicks off weakly, with a frenetic opener, 'It's Your Wedding Day.' And most of the ballads feel generic. When the music and Rob Ashford's choreography rev up, though, there are real gems."

Gianni Truzzi of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer: " The Wedding Singer sends up the 'greed-is-good' era of the 1980s through its worst pop-culture excesses. The onslaught of big hair, slut chic and flanged fashions, paired with an ebullient and limber ensemble, creates a pastel palette cringe fest that is, well, totally awesome, for sure… Newcomer Stephen Lynch gleams as Robbie the wedding singer, whose very name 'rob your heart' makes a demand on our empathy that Lynch sweetly earns… He is well-partnered with Broadway veteran Laura Benanti, whose waitress Julia is an anchor of muddled sensibility amid the frivolous maelstrom that surrounds her… While the film's soundtrack relied on known '80s hits, composer Matthew Sklar has sucked the essence from them for his own score… Beguelin and Sklar have improved on the film's script with their writing."

Tim Apello of Seattle Weekly: "Harvey Fierstein's Edna Turnblad in Hairspray was not as fat as the chances that The Wedding Singer will comparably stomp Broadway when it opens there in April. In place of Harvey and Marissa Jaret Winokur as the big Turnblad girls, we get the wee homunculus Stephen Lynch straining to fill Adam Sandler's checkered shoes as Robbie the Wedding Singer. And as Julia, the waitress of his eventual dreams, we have Laura Benanti, a talented singer and winsome actor in fine voice, and the wrong role... I'm not sure how much to blame director John Rando. He's a smooth mover. But it was easier to forgive the many bad technical screwups that plagued Hairspray's 5th Avenue world premiere than this show's cold, jeweled movement. It's a heartless putdown of '80s heartlessness."