Review: Familiar Rock Dreams in ‘Gettin’ the Band Back Together’

When a Broadway show needs a preshow warm-up, what follows is likely half-baked.

At least that’s the case with “Gettin’ the Band Back Together,” the empty-headed entertainment that opened on Monday at the Belasco Theater. In a scripted welcome before the curtain, Ken Davenport, the lead producer and a co-author of the book, delivers a supercharged spiel that bodes ill — and begins with a whopper. “What you’re about to see is one of those rare things on Broadway these days,” he says. “A totally original musical.”

To the extent that “Gettin’ the Band Back Together” is not based on a specific pre-existing property, he’s technically right. But originality isn’t novelty, and the show is such a calculated rehash of a million tired tropes that it can best be described with Broadway math: “School of Rock” plus “The Full Monty” divided by “The Wedding Singer” — and multiplied by zero.

Like “The Full Monty,” it concerns a bunch of middle-aged men trying to revive their flagging spirits by putting on a show. In this case, the men are former members of a garage band called Juggernaut, whose high school dreams of rock superstardom have dissolved into careerism and slackerdom.

Mitch, once Juggernaut’s lead singer, is a stockbroker so bad at his job that he gets fired on his 40th birthday. When he slinks back to New Jersey to live with his mother, he discovers that her home has been threatened with foreclosure by Tygen Billows, the once and forever frontman of Juggernaut’s old nemesis, Mouthfeel. (How he came to own “73 percent of the real estate” in town is a mystery barely acknowledged.) To rescue the house and his self-esteem, Mitch agrees to a rematch of the epochal battle of the bands that Mouthfeel lost years earlier.

The redemptive competition is a vigorous nod to “School of Rock,” and so is the sequence in which Mitch (Mitchell Jarvis) reassembles his players. They include Bart Vickers (Jay Klaitz), a shlubby math teacher with a secret crush; Sully Sullivan (Paul Whitty), a police officer with Broadway dreams; and Rummesh Patel (Manu Narayan), a nerd who wanted to be a pediatrician but was instead pressured into entering his father’s dermatology practice — and, imminently, an arranged marriage.

Because more clichés can still be accommodated, a fifth member of Juggernaut must be recruited to replace one who has conveniently died in the interim; cue the audition sequence lifted from “The Full Monty.” Naturally the new kid, Ricky Bling (Sawyer Nunes), saves the day at the reconstituted band’s first gig. At an Orthodox Jewish wedding he delivers a “comical” rap (including the immortal line “make a ruckus with your tuchis”) closely patterned on the one in the “The Wedding Singer.”

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery but in a musical it cancels the possibility of surprise. Here the obviousness of the characters and the outcome of the plot give the songs almost nothing to do, and here I’m able to say that Mark Allen, who wrote the music and lyrics, is equal to the task. His tunes are so rote they’re textureless, and his lyrics make about as much sense as random phrases sent through several passes of Google Translate.

“I took the safe road / to a life of stocks and bonds,” Mitch sings. “And bonded years / the same day reloaded / and hindsight crystal clear.” So true.

Still, the lyrics are not as fuzzy as the book, which Mr. Davenport wrote with an improv comedy collective called The Grundleshotz. There are 12 Grundleshotzes, one of whom, Sarah Saltzberg, also provided “additional material.” (I wish it had been subtractional.) With its slapdash aesthetic, the result has the mouthfeel of mystery stew: old ingredients randomly cooked.

Even that could work, in the manner of a witty, loose-limbed revue like “Spamalot,” but the jokes here are just New Jersey burns and “that’s what she said” groaners. (Mitch’s mother, a piano teacher in yoga pants played winningly by Marilu Henner, calls a “hedge fund” a “shrub fund.”) What’s left is a show that makes fun of the conventions of musical theater while trying desperately to adhere to them.

As such, the characters are barely even archetypes. Tygen (Brandon Williams) is a hair metal narcissist who can’t finish a sentence; his entourage are vamps and half-wits. In general, the women are groupies, dim blondes or foxy single moms raising teenage angst-machines; the men of Juggernaut are heart-of-gold sad sacks. By the time several cast members “break” in a clearly scripted eruption of supposed hilarity, you begin to feel that the show, in its mania to please, has crossed a line from silly to clammy. You want its hands off you.

With such icky material, a clean production like the one the director John Rando delivers can make matters worse. (It looks and moves like a real musical; why doesn’t it feel like one?) The scenic design by Derek McLane and costume design by Emily Rebholz are suitably cartoony, but the lighting, by Ken Billington, goes too far into rock concert fantasy. Likewise, Chris Bailey’s choreography leans heavily on mimed air-guitar licks and high-five exuberance.

The cast, too, sells the show as hard as it can, which is not a pleasant sensation when it’s clear enough that no one is buying. (Well, the town of Sayreville, N.J., where the story is set, is buying; it has signed on as a co-producer.) Still, I admired the band members playing their own instruments, and the quick-sketch confidence of Tamika Lawrence and Ryan Duncan in utterly beside-the-point bits.

But when the digressions are more engaging than the main story, something’s fatally wrong. In “Gettin’ the Band Back Together,” the problems likely started in the improv room, where a necessary atmosphere of supportive encouragement can lead to least-common-denominator results. Nor were those problems resolved during the show’s 2013 tryout in New Jersey.

Maybe, in hindsight crystal clear, the title’s annoying apostrophe should have been a clue to its ambitions. The show aims so low that all it achieves is a ruckus in the tuchis.