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Review: [Title of Show]

BY LINDA WINER | linda.winer@newsday.com

July 18, 2008

Actors, from left, Heidi Blickenstaff, Hunter Bell, Susan Blackwell, and Jeff Bowen are shown in the original Broadway musical, "Title of Show." (AP Photo)

"Title of show," which opened on Broadway last night after four years of writing and waiting, may be the ultimate let's-put-on-a-show musical.

Created and performed by two self-described "nobodies in New York," the first entry of the new season is a clever and often adorable little invention about writing a musical about two nobodies writing a musical while performing the musical. Got that?

The title is what composer Jeff Bowen and author Hunter Bell - both show-biz obsessives - called this meta-project while filling out the application form for the New York Musical Theatre Festival in 2004. The men and their two self-described "secondary characters" - Heidi Blickenstaff and Susan Blackwell - were a hit at the festival and Off-Broadway at the Vineyard Theatre in 2006.

Their inside-baseball humor, their sardonic attitude and their Cinderella story arrive at the creators' mainstream fantasy fulfillment with a passionate fan base, nurtured on the Internet by a come-on-along YouTube series about the show.

Everyone in Michael Berresse's production is quick and charming. The setup - four mismatched chairs, street clothes and a grimy rehearsal room - has a prepossessing anti-spectacle ordinariness. The show-tune pastiche - think Laura Nyro as interpreted by William Finn - is accompanied by the amusing Larry Pressgrove on a lone keyboard.

How I wish I could love the show. I wish I didn't feel that I was being manipulated by long-struggling talented people on a guilt trip. Most of all, considering the risk, I wish the offbeat and low-budget show belonged on Broadway - not incidentally, at the same ticket price as the magnificent and massive "South Pacific."

The producers are responsible for having brought "Rent," "Avenue Q" and "In the Heights" from Off-Broadway to the commercial theater. Clearly, they have antennae for original material that appeals to both young and crossover audiences.

But the show is so desperate to be loved - and yet so defiantly defensive and so oddly pleased with its success - that there's no room for audiences to discover the endearing smartness for themselves. I keep trying not to remember that classic National Lampoon cover, the one with a gun pointed at a dog's head and the threat: "Buy this magazine or we'll shoot this dog." Finding fault with the show is a bit like kicking a puppy that bites.

WHERE Lyceum Theatre, 149 W. 45th St.

LENGTH 1:45

BOTTOM LINE Shameless emotional blackmail, but with charm