Saks, Lies and Videotape
If there's any silver lining to be found in the premature death of Pulitzer Prize-winning, Jewish-American playwright Wendy Wasserstein, it's that she didn't live to see this musical bastardization of her life's work. In J.A.P. Chronicles, The Musical, chick-lit wunderkind Isabelle Rose seeks to extend the franchise created by her inexplicably successful and similarly titled novel. She should have just opened a Hamburger Mary's and left us out of it.
From the pre-curtain cell phone announcement requesting-in a nasal J.A.P.-anese, natch-that audience members "kick off your Manolos," it's clear we're in for an evening of strained comedy. When one of Rose's thinly drawn characters defines a J.A.P. as a "frigid, whiny, nail-filing shopaholic," the evening descends irrevocably into self-loathing that no amount of "Jewish American Powerhouse"-ing can mitigate.
The Scarsdale-thin plot concerns a Lower East Side documentary filmmaker who stonewalls a proposal from her shiksa boyfriend so she can attend a reunion of her summer camp, while also lensing a nonfiction film about J.A.P.s meant to blow the lid off a childhood incident that left her permanently scarred as an adult. Let's just say something was inserted into her anus all those years ago at Camp Willow Lake, and boy, what comes around goes around.
One begins to wonder whom, precisely, J.A.P Chronicles is written for, given that ditties like "J.A.P.P.Y. Rhymes with Happy" wouldn't even cut it as music by which to flush out HAMAS. This is a musical-and I use the term loosely, as the evening proceeds to canned tracks, just shy of the poolside resort video that would officially qualify it as karaoke.
The real effrontery is Rose squanders an embarrassment of riches-allegedly thrown at this production by the author's parents-and lyrics like "Don't introspect, write a check" must really rub in the salt. Charles Busch stalwart, Carl Andress, is on hand to direct-and does the most with this material, much more than it deserves, actually-but even he can't save a one-woman show that attempts to delineate six different characters via eyewear.
"Thank God I'm not one of them," the "Academy Award-nominated" passive-aggressive with a tripod seethes at the top of the show. I mean, the nerve! First the Meat Packing District, and now Hollywood? Let's just rest assured that a Tony won't be tangoing on Rose's mantle anytime soon.