NEW YORK — Yes, Jimmy Buffett, it’s your own damn fault.
Oh, I know, you had help in the commission of “Escape to Margaritaville,” the lamely antiseptic musical that had its official Broadway opening Thursday night at the Marquis Theatre. But it’s your songs that book writers Greg Garcia and Mike O’Malley have spun into this insufferably dumb show, about a beach bum guitarist who falls for an environmental scientist while his bartender buddy suffers flashbacks filled with tap-dancing life insurance agents. (Yup, you read that right.)
“Escape to Margaritaville” also features, for reasons that won’t be parsed here, leggy clouds sashaying right out of a discarded Rockettes number; a female sidekick who flies on cables to the cheeseburger station at a Cincinnati wedding rehearsal dinner; and enough bad jokes to stock a late-’60s sitcom. Example: “I was addicted to the hokey pokey,” says the bartender, played by Eric Petersen, “but I turned myself around.”
The musical, directed (inexplicably) by Christopher Ashley, who won a Tony last season for his work on “Come From Away,” is built around the Buffett song that practically everyone knows, the especially catchy one that goes, “Wasted away again in Margaritaville.” It’s deployed as the Act 1 finale, and the lyrics are used as such a literal guideline that one of the characters is actually “nibblin’ on spongecake” as the number begins.
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