LYLE
Unfortunately, Lyle needs a lot more than extra laughs. Characters that an audience can give a damn about would be nice for starters. So would a score that contained at least one song worth remembering, or a script that did more than depend on allegedly cute kids and animals for its appeal.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The meandering story, loosely based on Bernard Waber’s 1962 children’s book The House on East 88th Street, tells of Josh Primm, a boy whose family moves to New York and finds a crocodile named Lyle swimming around in the bathtub of their new home. (In Waber’s book, Lyle only eats Turkish caviar, one of many whimsical touches the musical has unfortunately dispensed with without substituting anything worthwhile.)
Lyle has much bigger problems than crocodile cosmetics, though. Strouse, a talented and accomplished theater composer, has written successful musicals in the past, including Bye Bye Birdie and Applause. Those shows had an all-important element Lyle lacks: a lyricist other than Strouse. Lacking the creative inspiration and verbal inventiveness provided by a Lee Adams (Birdie) or a Martin Charnin (Annie), Strouse provides songs that are generic at best. In one scene, the vaudevillian sings a number whose words are a collection of pop-song cliches (“I did it my way,” “The sun will come out tomorrow”). The joke gets a laugh–but the audience’s amusement is informed by a sad awareness that even those pat phrases have more spark than the bland banalities Strouse comes up with on his own.
