Guttenberg! The Musical!

A review by Patrick Shannon, III

Guttenberg! The Musical! was recently presented by Fourfront

Theatre on stage at the Southern Rep Theatre. It at worked to an

extent only because of the great chemistry between its two

performers, Gary Rucker as Doug Simon and Sean Patterson as Bud

Davenport with the incidental support of James Kelly as Charles.

They have become the Bud Abbot and Lou Costello of our town and I

don't think anyone else could have made a faux silk purse out of

such a pigs ear. This show is another example of the silly trash

that comes in great quantity from the annual New York Musical

Festival, while many worthwhile shows presented there are

ignored.

Rucker and Patterson's snappy direction and high energy alone

made Guttenberg! The Musical! endurable. The musical was totally

forgettable and the script, while cute, was perhaps more

acceptable to those younger people, those aspiring actors and

their fans, those Tulane Theater students and other young and old

academic types with little real knowledge and a dumb taste for

enduring theater.

While this childish concept of creating a life complete with

romance and sophomoric references to the muddy mediaeval period

of history when Guttenberg was alive was a good as the plot for

many another more successful show, the creators with a little

more imagination could have supplied much more interesting

material than a running joke about thatched roofed.

The idea of using baseball hats with the names of village

characters written in black ink on each was quite clever but once

again, the only thing that made this piece of soporific silliness

worth a shot was the extremely highly talented duo of Gary Rucker

and Sean Patterson. Only they and the high galvanic result of

their direction could have given any life to this moribund

example of the small talents of creators Scott Brown and Anthony

King. It's a high school show for aspiring tween talents. But I

understand that that great majority of theater patrons in our

town perhaps with adolescent world views and unsophisticated

taste filled the houses and made this first production of The

Forefront Theatre a box office success. I am sincerely glad and

I know this production company, with the talents of its founders

will bring us some really fine and seriously worthwhile theater.

At this point all I can say like our towns Becky Allen is "Thank

Gawd fa da great talents of Rucker and Patterson and dere tech

krewe."