It Shoulda Been You, is a musical comedy for anyone with parents. The bride is Jewish. The groom is Catholic. Her mother is a force of nature, his mother is a tempest in a cocktail shaker. And when the bride's ex-boyfriend shows up, the perfect wedding starts to unravel faster than you can whistle "Here Comes the Bride!"
The cast of It Shoulda Been You includes Tony Award-winner Tyne Daly, Tony Award-winner Harriet Harris, Sierra Boggess, Lisa Howard, David Burtka, Tony Award nominee Montego Glover, Chip Zien, Josh Grisetti, Adam Heller, Michael X. Martin, Anne L. Nathan, Nick Spangler, and Edward Hibbert, along with Farah Alvin, Gina Farrell, Aaron Finley, Mitch Greenberg, and Jillian Louis.
...It Shoulda Been You, which plays like vintage dinner theater infused with a Borscht Belt sensibility. That it nonetheless manages to be truly amusing is a testament to the talent both on and offstage: such comic pros as Tyne Daly, Harriet Harris and Edward Hibbert manage to make the hoariest of jokes uproarious, while director David Hyde Pierce has staged the proceedings with a brisk expertise that makes the 100 intermissionless minutes fly by. It's the sort of show that practically redefines the term 'guilty pleasure'...The score by composer Barbara Anselmi...and book writer-lyricist Brian Hargrove (Hyde Pierce's real-life husband) is utterly negligible, and the show would probably have worked just fine without it...The characters and situations are hopelessly contrived and formulaic...and the plot twist late in the show will only seem shocking to Middle Americans...But for all its obvious deficiencies, It Shoulda Been You...is the sort of shamelessly lowbrow comedy too often missing from Broadway these days, Larry David's Fish in the Dark notwithstanding.
...there are times when 'It Shoulda Been You,' replete with its snarky mothers-in-law...perfidious groom, lusty servers, neurotic bride (played, mostly straight, by Sierra Boggess) and various hangers-on with agendas, feels as if it belongs to a previous generation of shows with similarly chirpy scores that you thought had choked long ago on the prime rib once served for dinner. Then again, the reason for the resilience of the comedy about the wedding...is that most of us have either had one, are relishing one or are worrying that there never will be one for us. That ease of identification, coupled with strikingly lively direction from David Hyde Pierce and a veritable plethora of superb farcical performances from the likes of Tyne Daly and Harriet Harris, explains why a great deal of the content in this show -- which actually is much better than the above description implies -- lands with its audience.
Videos