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Hardly matters anymore if a musical is a hit or a flop on Broadway. Big regional companies like Addison’s WaterTower Theatre are so starved for new shows they’ll grab rights to anything that played a week or two in New York, as long as there are roles for hot young talent and power ballads to pump. This is how we get Bonnie & Clyde, the terrible Frank Wildhorn musical that closed after four weeks on Broadway in 2011 and now is fogging up the stage at WaterTower.
Wildhorn is the hacky composer of similarly awful musicals about Dracula and Jekyll and Hyde. His shows are loud and long. Bonnie & Clyde runs two hours and 40 minutes. Patience runs out sooner.
The title characters are played by Kayla Carlyle, last seen belting her heart out at WaterTower in Spring Awakening, and John Campione, who sang big in tight pants in Dallas Theater Center’s humpy Les Miz. They sizzle together.
Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, real-life lovers and stick-up artists who came out of West Dallas in the 1930s, were dumb and homely. Carlyle and Campione are smart and gorgeous, which is another knock against a show that glamorizes violent outlaws through performances by better human beings. (I’d say the same thing about the 1967 Bonnie & Clyde film starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty but … Faye Dunaway.)
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WaterTower’s leads wrap their tonsils around Wildhorn’s crap pastiche of gospel, rockabilly, blues and blah-rock. Every song begs Bonnie and/or Clyde to leave their life of crime or go farther into it. Clyde sings about how “Dyin’ Ain’t So Bad.” Bonnie sings about wanting to die before Clyde. Ah, romance.
The book by Ivan Menchell provides four or five weak lines of dialogue between each sound-alike number. Lyrics by Don Black go in one ear and out the other, just not fast enough. The second act reprises five songs heard in the first.
Director René Moreno moves the big cast around scenery by Sarah B. Brown that looks just like the set for WTT’s recent Grapes of Wrath. Yards and yards of planks. Awkward follow spots search for the faces of whoever’s singing. A fog machine whirs away throughout, creating the smoky atmosphere not of West Dallas in the Dust Bowl but of Jack the Ripper’s London.
