Gettin’ the Band Back Together

Book by Ken Davenport and the Grundleshotz; music & lyrics by Mark Allen

Directed by John Rando

Vanity projects don’t come more desperate than Gettin’ the Band Back Together, with a book co-written by Ken Davenport, one of its producers, who brags to the audience before the show begins that it was created through improv. Unsurprisingly, that mish-mash of witless, unfunny, uninteresting anecdotes and characters was stitched together into a dreary, overlong musical with pseudo-rock songs that try to (but never) approximate the hitmakers they emulate, Bon Jovi.

Bon Jovi is quite a low bar, but songwriter Mark Allen never gets over it. The story is about Mitch, a failed Wall Streeter who returns to his hometown of Sayreville, NJ (where Jon Bon Jovi came from) to find that it’s apparently stuck in a time warp, with his high school friends still living there and his high school nemesis Tygen still winning local band competitions. When Mitch finds out that Tygen owns much of Sayreville, including his mother Sharon’s house (which she has foreclosed on), he takes Tygen’s challenge to join the contest and is soon back in the garage with his buds in the band Juggernaut, playing the rock’n’roll music they love so much.

This could have been a breezy, 80-minute off-off Broadway show, but instead, at 2-1/2 hours, Band treats its non-story like the preparations for D-Day. Very little of this is amusing, much is risible, and nothing’s memorable. Worst is how the women are treated: Mitch’s mom Sharon is a MILF who has an affair with Bart, the clownish high school teacher who plays bass in Juggernaut, to Mitch’s understandable disgust. It’s played for laughs, but more obnoxious is how Dani, Mitch’s long-ago girlfriend, is treated: a single mom with a teenage daughter, she’s—get this—dating self-centered Tygen, which makes no sense but, since it gets Mitch’s goat, into the show it goes. 

The songs blend together blandly—and playing tunes by the likes of The Who, the Beatles, and Grand Funk Railroad pre-show and at intermission, and having Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry figure in the plot (he screwed Mitch’s mom many decades ago), does the show no favors—even if the slickness of John Rando’s direction, and Derek McLane’s and Ken Billington’s clever sets and lighting, ensure that it all looks like a professional production.

The energetic cast works hard, especially in two stupefyingly weird numbers that open Act II and that provide “what the hell was that?” entertainment: a rap-metal “Hava Nagila” at a Jewish wedding and a song “Second Chances,” wherein the world’s most self-pitying lounge singer bemoans his romantic misfires at the local diner.

The only ones escaping this mess unscathed are the ageless Marilu Henner as Sharon and the matchless Kelli Barrett as Dani. Barrett is a Rock of Ages alumna—she made the original off-Broadway incarnation palatable—but has since gone from flop to flop like the Doctor Zhivago musical and now this. She deserves much better. 

Gettin’ the Band Back Together

Belasco Theatre, 111 West 44th Street, NY, NY

Gettinthebandbacktogether.com