BOOK OF THE NIGHT
Book of the Night is without doubt one of the best mediocre musicals I’ve ever seen. In fact, its mediocrity is so fully realized here, thanks to Robert Falls, that you’d almost certainly enjoy it. You might even think it was good.
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The cliches are a lot more troublesome–though I suppose there’s something to be said for the frank way they’re deployed. With half the show set in places with kitschily hard-boiled names like the Empty Arms Hotel and the Midnight Bar and Grill, Book of the Night wears its obviousness on its sleeve, where obviousness no doubt belongs if it belongs at all. And where there’s at least the possibility of its being mistaken for an aesthetic: a sort of sentimentalized version of urban grit a la Raymond Chandler or Nelson Algren.
That Bishop and Rosen’s lyrics are often literate and warm and clever doesn’t mitigate the creeping impression that there’s absolutely nothing new here. And the repetitions of Rosen’s monotonously competent score only make that impression more intense.
