Friday, September 05, 2008

Fringe Review: Gutenberg! The Musical!

Gutenberg! The Musical!
Granville Island Stage
Friday, September 5 2008 4:45pm

Following in the footsteps of The Producers and Spamalot this production pokes fun at the conventions of Broadway musical theatre.

Bud and Doug are two friends with a dream of having their musical staged on Broadway. They perform a reading of their musical masterpiece about the inventor of the printing press Johannes Gutenberg, with the hope that in the audience there might be a Broadway producer willing to produce their dream.

Working within a Fringe budget the two of them perform all the roles with the aid of a table crammed full of labelled baseball caps which they don for each character. Bud and Doug are two clueless and dorky young men with big ambition but little talent. Unwittingly, their progeny is a total send up of a Broadway musical with goofy lyrics, formulaic tunes, stereotypical characters, and hackneyed plot.

Well played with good comic talent and suitably goofy singing and dancing. The Fringe's answer to Springtime for Hitler.

4/5

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