Head Over Heels
Opening Night: July 26, 2018
Closing: January 6, 2019
Theater: Hudson Theatre
Heaven is a place on Broadway! Head Over Heels is the bold and fierce new musical comedy from the visionaries that rocked Broadway with Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Avenue Q and Spring Awakening. Set to the iconic music of the 1980’s all-female rock band The Go-Go’s, it includes the hit songs “We Got the Beat,” “Our Lips Are Sealed,” “Vacation,” Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven is a Place on Earth,” and many more! It’s a hilarious and sexy celebration of love in all its infinite varieties, told through the story of a royal family that must embark on an extravagant journey to save their beloved kingdom, and find love and acceptance.
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July 26, 2018
You would think that a sexually polymorphous musical that combines a Renaissance pastoral romance with the songs of the 1980s California rock group the Go-Go’s would at the very least be a hoot, a show that could get sloppy drunk on its own outrageousness. Yet “Head Over Heels,” which opened on Thursday night at the Hudson Theater, feels as timid and awkward as the new kid on the first day of school. Make that the new kid who longs to run with the wild crowd but can’t quite commit to being as bad as coolness demands. Directed by Michael Mayer, who has been more than competent at the helm of Broadway rock musicals like “American Idiot” and “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” “Head Over Heels” lacks the courage of its contradictions. It mutters deferentially when what you want is a rebel yell.
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July 26, 2018
Sir Philip Sidney, a modest and courtly chap of Shakespearean vintage, self-described his 1580 heroic prose poem “Arcadia” as “a trifle, triflingly handled.” Back in the misogynistic wasteland of 1980s music criticism, that’s precisely how a lot of men described the music of the Go-Go’s, an influential new-wave band of pioneering women who constantly had to fight off the criticism they merely were dispensing safe, cute, bubble-gum pop. “Head Over Heels,” the atypically ambitious new Broadway jukebox musical with origins at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and a book by Jeff Whitty, combines the song stylings of the Go-Go’s with a pastoral plot and structure derived from James Magruder’s adaptation of Sidney’s “Arcadia.”
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July 26, 2018
To enjoy Head Over Heels, which offers quite a lot to enjoy, it is probably best to kick up your heels and put your head on hold. That’s not to say that this saucy, boisterous musical doesn’t have a brainy side, starting with its ambitious crossbreeding of four time periods: It grafts a 2010s queer sensibility onto songs from the 1980s—by the all-girl pop-punk quintet the Go-Go’s (plus two hits from lead singer Belinda Carlisle’s solo career)—and fits them into a 16th-century story that is set in ancient Greece. The dialogue, in iambic pentameter liberally sprinkled with thou and thee, contrasts amusingly with the unornamented lyrics of such go-to Go-Go’s bops as “Vacation,” “Our Lips Are Sealed” and “We Got the Beat.”
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July 26, 2018
There are a lot of “ifs” that will determine your appreciation of this one. If you like the music of the Go-Go’s, if you’re partial to silly period musicals, if you’re into Sir Philip Sidney. Yep, you heard that right. “Head Over Heels” is a cockamamie mish mash of disparate elements that at best is a high-energy goofball of a show and at worst, well…see for yourself.
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July 26, 2018
You have to give credit to the creators of Head Over Heels for thinking outside the box. One might have expected a musical inspired by the songs of The Go-Go’s to be either a biography of the popular all-female ’80s band or perhaps a modern story set in the sun-drenched environs of Southern California from where they hail. Instead, Head Over Heels bases its storyline on Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. Because the first thing that comes to mind when you think of The Go-Go’s is 16th-century English pastorals. If you have trouble imagining songs like “Vacation” and “Cool Jerk” fitting into a scenario depicting a royal family’s romantic complications, you still will after seeing this relentlessly frothy musical, for which the term “check your brain at the door” could have been invented. The farcical, gender-fluid shenanigans are as campy as things get on Broadway. And that’s saying something.
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