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The New York Musical Theatre Festival 2015 Why does it take so long for the giant dancing penis to appear? This is the prevailing question of the New York Musical Theatre entry titled (yes, this is the whole thing) Real Men, a musical for guys and the women who put with them. The context is a middle-aged guy who feels so emasculated by his wife that it's as if his manhood is no longer his, so on a rare night off, he's able to... uh... enjoy the company of... Okay, no, sorry, I'm not going to try to justify the one-man-one-phallus pas de deux that ensues. (I also don't want to think about it too much, and neither should you.) Like nearly everything else in this inane 90-minute revue, there is no greater point. The song is a cheap laugh, the costume is a cheap laugh, everything is a cheap laugh—and so, ultimately, is the show. What Paul Louis and Nick Santa Maria (who also appear onstage, with Stephen G. Anthony) have written, per their opening number, is a thorough mocking of the kind of musical straight men would theoretically like. Songs teasing therapy. Songs musing on why women like jerks. Songs set at the urinal. Songs about how listening to a woman is the easiest way to get her into bed. Songs about the dumb ways guys talk to each other at the bar. Then, later, songs about kids and mortality. And, for some reason, puppets (designed by Louis and Ellis Tillman in a low-rent Avenue Q style), including one whose bodice is bursting with basketball-sized cleavage and another that keeps hiking up her dress to show her underwear. There are no new ideas—the biggest shock in the duet between the fiftysomething puppet and the armed robber puppet is that it takes so long to arrive at the obvious "losing his memory" joke—and no clever spins on old ones. The better moments are the rare ones when things get marginally more serious, and someone muses on what he learned from his own father or how he constantly renews his relationship with his wife. But even here, these attempts pale compared to those in Maltby and Shire's adult-oriented Closer Than Ever, which treads similar ground but never gets as close to the surface in its content or as plunkity-plunk in its melodies as Real Men does. The direction (by David Arisco) gets you from first scene to last, and the performances, if in no way remarkable, aren't inept. And there's enough thrown at you that, by the law of averages, some things are bound to stick—I cackled, against my will, at the adorably sadistic way a little girl puppet kept kicking her new stepdad in "A Woman With Kids," and the dopey surprise finish of the new-father trio, "I Will Be There for You." But this musical, which premiered in 2012 in Coral Gables, Florida, still depends on that dancing penis for its crowning comedy bit. The rest of Real Men could be Guys and Dolls, and it just wouldn't matter.
Real Men
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