Atomic Ends Just the Way You’d Think, Only Worse

Atomic is the kind of show the late Mary Rodgers famously called a why? musical: One that fills no conceivable need. Or am I mistaken: Did the story of the nuclear physicist Leó Szilárd, one of the tortured brains behind the Manhattan Project, cry out to be deepened with pseudo-Who power ballads like “The Atom Bomb Is Here”? No bad play is as bad as a bad musical, which has so many ways to fail. The creators of Atomic, originally staged in Australia, have cleverly found them all. In dramatizing Szilárd’s path from paper genius to deterrence enthusiast to horrified onlooker as his invention is used aggressively on Japan instead of as a threat to Germany, they have trivialized one of the most consequential stories in modern history and haven’t even offered any good tunes in return. With its loose threads of melody strung limply over armatures of familiar chords, the score depends for its effects on the empty gestures of confessional rock, which become more embarrassing the harder they’re pushed. Which is, in this case, very hard. A mere ten minutes in, Szilárd (Jeremy Kushnier) leaps onto a table at the intersection of hot white spots to belt his “Pinball Wizard” moment: “I will build a chain reaction that will light up the world.”