ONE HIT WONDER
nytheatre.com review by Lee Ramsey
August 15, 2003
A wide-eyed innocent from Texas, Jack Harmony (Matthew D. McCallum), wins
a television contest and gets his chance to appear in a video with his
idols, an untalented pop group called Sexxx Machine (Ben Medley and
Raquel Hecker). Jack's parents (Charlotte Booker and Craig Baldwin) are
not thrilled, to say the least, that their impressionable son is going
off to Japan to join in the wild rock scene. He also has a neighbor
Nicci (Marguerite Stimpson), a poet/performance artist who is
desperately in love with him (but can he return her affections?) and
there's a VJ named Monkey Man (Alex Finch) thrown in apparently just to
provide expositionThat is the basic premise of One Hit Wonder, now playing at the Kraine Theatre. I'd love to be able to say something positive or even something constructive about the production, but I can't. Unfortunately, this new musical fails to succeed on any level. The book, music, and lyrics (by Ben Medley with musical arrangements by Mike Shaieb and Brent Lord) are at best sophomoric and repetitive and the staging and overall direction (by Dan Rigazzi) just makes matters worse. The cast is (with the exception of Charlotte Booker, who does very nice work as Jack's Texan mother and an Angel Airlines flight attendant) amateurish. The press release says: "This over-the-top coming of age story is the theatrical lovechild of Showgirls, Beautiful Thing and Hedwig!" One Hit Wonder should be so lucky.
