Baby It's You! Broadway Reviews

It becomes clear by the second act that Greenberg's story - or the acts she discovered - cannot sustain this musical....An actress portraying Leslie Gore makes an appearance singing 'It's My Party' but it's not clear why. Toward the end, it really has become a jukebox musical, adding songs for atmosphere rather than consistency.

If your show is in trouble, be sure to get Beth Leavel in your cast...With subtle humor, expert timing, and knockout pipes, Leavel strives mightily to bring this mishmash of a rock tuner up to her level, but she can't perform miracles. There is an audience for this kind of show...but if you crave a well-written story with your nostalgic score, walk on by.

The 'Baby' players make the most of their threadbare parts. Leavel elevates the enterprise with pitch-perfect singing, acting and bouffant, her Florence blowzy and vulnerable. Near the end, Greenberg concedes that the Shirelles sound needs updating. The women record the resplendent title number, co-written by the then-up-and-coming Burt Bacharach. For a fleeting instant, the first major girl group of the rock era and the show about them seem to be going somewhere new.

The Shirelles, one of the greatest girl groups of all time (heck, they were covered by the Beatles), get a show of such total ineptitude and cynical profiteering that your mouth pretty much dangles open in disbelief for the duration of the entire tawdry proceedings...At least designer David H. Lawrence's parade of ever-changing hair gives you something to watch.

The subjects of race, female empowerment, and the fleeting nature of fame are all touched upon, but often glancingly, and fleshed-out characters are thin on the ground...If you are looking for a night out that is easy on the ear and the brain then, baby, Baby It's You is for you.

Meanwhile, those vintage song hits just keep on coming and Baby Boomers who are pushovers for nostalgic entertainment may well be diverted by “Baby, It’s You!,” which is synthetic in composition but thoroughly expert in delivery.

The show opened Wednesday night at the Broadhurst and boasts nearly three dozen hit songs. Among them, 'I Met Him on a Sunday,' 'He's So Fine,' 'Dedicated to the One I Love' and 'Walk on By.' The title of that last hit is my advice for this production, considering that the songs are so blandly performed they don't make an impression.

Flo herself is a Strong Sassy Lady so plainly traced from type, you can practically see the outline perforations. Leavel bears up and sings well, but there's little to rescue here. The real Flo Greenberg was, in her own words, 'a white woman who was in a black business and who couldn't carry a tune.' Whereas the stage version sings her heart out - only, whoops! There's nothing in it.

Mutrux and Sheldon Epps' in-and-out staging is like a glorified revue, an impression reinforced by the book's bullet-point approach. The biographical elements dig barely deeper than the superfluous historical markers ('As 1960 passes, 'Bonanza' is TV's best'). With more ambition and focus, 'Baby It's You!' could have been 'Jersey Girls' -- the female answer to the juggernaut musical about the Four Seasons.

Mama said there'll be shows like this. But she didn't tell me there would be quite so many, or that any one of them could be this dismal. Invitations to sing along are flung at the audience regularly, as if they were life preservers. Further inducements to wallow in visions of happy yesterdays are provided by the slide shows of drive-ins and diners and other cultural markers of the period, accompanied by the silky narration of Geno Henderson, playing a sort of cosmic D.J. who registers the passing years with material cut and pasted from Wikipedia.

Now we have 'Baby It's You!,' a bio-revue that uses hits from the late '50s and early '60s to trace another pop-producing/composing career, this one of a New Jersey...it's just another jukebox musical.

You can’t say that the new musical Baby It’s You! is shy about its intentions. In the opening moments of this show about the mega-selling ‘60s girl group The Shirelles, an image of a jukebox is projected. Clearly this new effort conceived by Floyd Mutrux (Million Dollar Quartet) is aiming to be a jukebox musical competitor to Jersey Boys. Except in this case a more accurate title would be “Jersey Girls.”

A Tony winner for The Drowsy Chaperone, Leavel is a fine singer and gifted musical-comedy performer who deserves better than this stereotypical cutout. For a show about a woman who carved her career on having a great ear for a crisp, catchy hit, it grates that the songs are so carelessly handled...Through his American Pop Anthology production banner, Mutrux is developing other jukebox shows. But on the basis of Baby It's You, artists who care about the way their back-catalogs are represented might want to run and hide.

Baby It’s You! may attract an undiscriminating audience for a spell, but this brand of pandering pap has limited appeal. If I wanted to sit around listening to 50-year-old pop tunes and corny jokes, wallowing in boomer nostalgia while pretending to enjoy myself, I’d visit my mother at her condo in Florida. At least she knows how to cook.

Imagine 'Jersey Boys' without the carefully integrated character development of Frankie Valli and Bob Gaudio, and with a tunestack only one quarter as imperishable. You needn't imagine it; just wander to the Broadhurst for 'Baby It's You!,' the new jukeboxer outlining the rise and demise of the Shirelles...Leavel ('Drowsy Chaperone') does all she can with the leading role, but the authors make impossible demands.

That's what is most irksome about 'Baby It's You!': It's a wasted opportunity to tell what really happened when a nice Jewish housewife took four nice black Jersey girls and made them very, very famous. I'd happily pay to read a book in which that story was told honestly and well—but I wouldn't pay a dime to see a musical that doesn't even try to do so, no matter how slick it sounds.