My Best Friend’s Wedding and Stereophonic: Too Much Music and Not Enough

Matt Doyle and Krystal Joy Brown in My Best Friend's Wedding. (Photo: Nile Scott Studios)

The notion of a jukebox stage musical based on the 1997 romantic comedy My Best Friend’s Wedding, featuring the songs of Burt Bacharach and Hal David and directed and choreographed by Kathleen Marshall (who has helmed ace Broadway revivals of Kiss Me, Kate, Wonderful Town and Anything Goes), sounded promising. (The movie uses Bacharach-David tunes in key moments.) But the show, which is premiering at Ogunquit Playhouse in Maine, is both synthetic and clunky. The movie, written by Ron Bass and directed by P.J. Hogan, is an unconventional romantic comedy in which the heroine, Julianne, a magazine food critic, plays every dirty trick she can think of to stop her best friend and one-time lover Michael from walking down the aisle with Kimmy, the woman he’s fallen head over heels in love with, but her schemes keep backfiring. It’s a tricky proposition, because we fall in love with Kimmy too, yet Julianne is the heroine and the movie won’t work if we end up disliking her. The movie pulls it off because Julia Roberts, in a wonderful comic-neurotic performance, plays Julianne.

In the musical, which Bass and Jonathan Harvey co-wrote, the character is played by Krystal Joy Brown, who brings so much overcalculated show-biz energy to the role that not only does her Julianne fail to win our affection; she wears us out long before the curtain finally rings down, just past the three-hour limit. No one, in fact, quite registers as the show intends. As Michael, Matt Doyle, who won a Tony for the latest Broadway revival of Company (where he sang “Getting Married Today”), is affable and discharges his musical-comedy responsibilities efficiently, but he’s also rather bland. Lianah Sta. Ana is as sweet as Kimmy needs to be, but the linchpin scene where Julianne takes the wedding party to a karaoke club – because she knows that Kimmy can’t sing and becomes petrified if she’s made to – hasn’t been reconceived for a musical-theatre setting. In the movie, Kimmy (Cameron Diaz) gets up and fumbles her way through “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself” but when her rendition draws boos from strangers she makes fun of her own inadequacies, and everyone in the bar winds up cheering her on. In the musical, Kimmy seems to learn how to vocalize in the course of the song, and it sticks: Sta. Ana has a couple of more numbers during the evening and she handles them just fine. The fourth major character, Julianne’s gay best friend and editor, George, who shows up at the celebration in Chicago to counsel her, is played by Telly Leung, who reads his one-liners with the right dry-martini crispness. But George has been rewritten for a charismatic singer and a star dancer, and Leung is neither. His big number is “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” which Marshall has staged to emulate the title number from Singin’ in the Rain. To begin with, we’re painfully conscious throughout it that we’re watching a second-rate musical substitution; I love Bacharach and David, but this isn’t a song you want to showcase in a musical comedy. Worse, Leung’s dancing has no style, no pizzazz.

I’m not sure it’s possible to stage a show about a wedding under current economic restrictions; Marshall does everything she can to make eighteen performers look like the attendees and servers at a wedding staged by the owner of the Chicago White Sox and his wife, but you keep wondering when the rest of the crowd is going to arrive. (The only guest on the groom’s side is his kid brother.) That’s not the show’s fault, but the plastic-looking set, designed by Colin Richmond, is, and who came up with the idea of making the night-before party a costume ball where the father of the bride (Mark Lotito) shows up as Sally Bowles in Cabaret? And who decided that the mother of the bride should be an auxiliary diva role? Soara-Joye Ross belts her songs as if she’s trying to compete with the star, and she even has trouble staying on key.

That brings me to the most troublesome element in My Best Friend’s Wedding: the songs. There are twenty-two of them – a good half-dozen too many for any musical comedy – and at least half are shoehorned into dramatic contexts they obviously don’t fit. Among many examples, the most egregious is “Promises, Promises,” which Michael and Kimmy sing (separately) as an eleven-o’clock number, when Julianne’s meanest trick finally (if briefly) breaks them up. It was originally the title song for a 1968 Broadway musical based on Billy Wilder’s film The Apartment, where it dramatized the protagonist’s decision to stop compromising his principles to please the morally vacuous men he’s working for and follow his heart. You simply can’t have two people who have broken up on the eve of their wedding sing these lines:

Promises, their kind of promises can just destroy your life

Oh promises, those kind of promises take all the joy from life

Oh promises, promises, my kind of promises

Can lead to joy and hope and love, yes, love!

The people who put this show together must have hoped no one in the house was listening. Only one numbers really works: “I Say a Little Prayer,” which was also in the film (and in the same spot). It arrives nearly at the end of act one, considerably past the point where the musical seems to cry out for an intermission, and for a few minutes it levels things out. But the second act of My Best Friend’s Wedding is worse than the first, and if you have the movie in your head it’s deadening, because you know exactly how much of the twisty plot still has to unwind before the curtain call. That’s a feeling you never want to impose on an audience.

In foreground: Eli Gelb and Andrew R Butler in Stereophonic. (Photo: Chelcie Parry)

I had a ticket see Stereophonic, this year’s Tony Award winner, early in the summer but illness kept me away, and I caught up with it only recently. By now the two women in the original cast have moved on, and Will Brill, who plays Reg, the bass player, was out for the Wednesday matinee performance. (Cornelius McMoyler stepped in.) But the cast is still strong, and my problems with the show center on David Adjmi’s script, so I feel comfortable posting a review six months after its Broadway opening. (The play is scheduled to close shortly after the new year.)

This is one of two recent dramatic treatments of the story of a troubled 1970s hit rock and roll band inspired by Fleetwood Mac. The other, Daisy Jones & The Six, was a limited series that aired in 2023 and was notable mostly for Riley Keough’s dynamic performance as the titular lead singer – though in the last couple of episodes it managed to transcend melodrama, and moments from it stuck with me afterward. (James Ponsoldt, who made The Spectacular Now and The End of the Tour on the big screen, directed half of the episodes.) But its biggest flaw aside from the soap-opera writing was the music, and that’s a real liability for a series about the vicissitudes of a band.

Stereophonic has the opposite problem: the songs by Will Butler, late of Arcade Fire, are excellent but there aren’t enough of them. We hear two, “Bright” and “Masquerade,” more or less in their entirety, and snatches of a few others; in all there are about twenty minutes of music in a play that runs close to three and a half hours. Yet what happens in the recording studio, the show’s setting, among the band members while they’re actually performing – and their individual efforts to make the songs work (especially when the lead vocalist, Diana, played by Amy Forsyth, struggles against her fading self-confidence to pull off an especially challenging section of one of her own compositions) – are the high spots. The interpersonal drama focuses mostly on two turbulent relationships, Diana’s with Peter (Benjamin Anthony Anderson), the impossible genius in the group and its lead guitarist (presumably based on Lindsey Buckingham), and Reg’s with the keyboardist, Holly (Rebecca Naomi Jones); and somewhat less on the increasing estrangement of the drummer, Simon (Chris Stack), from his family in England. And those scenes are less original and less compelling. Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back showed us that witnessing gifted musicians in the process of creation can be mesmerizing. I wish Adjmi had given us much more of it.

The play keeps you watching but it’s not very good. The problem isn’t so much the length as the lack of structure; the script, which covers the period between June 1976 and June 1977, as what was meant to be a month or six weeks of studio time drifts into a nightmarish year, is rambling and diffuse. And though I always appreciate tonal variety, Adjmi doesn’t so much shift tones as lay them side by side. The casual humor is entertaining, especially when Grover, the engineer (Eli Gelb), and his awkward assistant Charlie (Andrew R. Butler), whom the band seems barely to notice (no one except Grover ever refers to him by name), are gossiping at the downstage control board. But when Holly suddenly tells Reg that she’s weary of taking care of him after he’s snorted too much cocaine, it feels like the play has dropped one script and picked up another. From that point on the dramatic content takes up far more stage time than the comic content, yet every time the play shuffles from one to the other the seams show. And I’m not sure how the director, Daniel Aukin, could have solved that problem given the way the play has been put together.

David Zinn’s scenic design is effective and it’s well lit by Jiyoun Chang, but when the band moves from a studio in Sausalito to one in L.A. for the final scene, we see no changes, not even tiny ones. If the point is that all studios look the same or that the switch in setting doesn’t make any difference because the principals’ behavior is unaltered, those ideas are too trite to be turned into a visual metaphor. The costume designer, Enver Chakartash, captures the period precisely without proclaiming it. The best thing about the show is Eli Gelb’s performance, which is witty, inventive and touching and also, I think, profound.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.