Were Critics Inspired by Off-Broadway's Sidd?

From the novel Siddhartha by Herman Hesse comes the new musical Sidd about a man's journey for enlightenment. The show went through a lot of changes including the replacement of two leads in preparation for its March 15 opening at New World Stages. Did critics think seeing the final product was a spiritual experience?

Here is a sampling of what they had to say:

William Stevenson in his Broadway.com Review: "Like the book, the new musical traces an Indian man's path to enlightenment. Unfortunately, Sidd presents a long, dull, musically bland path to enlightenment…. [Doug] Silver's songs offer only snippets of melodies and then ramble on without much of a tune… Yes, for those who get a kick out of wrongheaded musicals like In My Life, Sidd has titter-inducing moments. Besides the silly choreography, the earnest musical also boasts some dopey dialogue and a few way-over-the-top performances."

Charles Isherwood of The New York Times: "The musical hits all the major pit stops on Siddhartha's road to self-fulfillment, but the quiet integrity of Hesse's novel gets a little corrupted along the way, despite the authors' obvious desire to remain true to the novel's central messages. It's hard to take seriously Siddhartha's descent into the corruptions of the flesh when they are represented by a hotcha interlude that borrows every hip-twitching, hand-twirling cliché from the Bob Fosse back catalog, including the bowler hats… The songs charting the turning points on Sidd's spiritual path are, for the most part, pleasant theater pop with some infusions of Eastern-sounding percussion. But their lack of distinctive musical character becomes enervating ."