April 23, 2018

Lookin’ for some hot stuff baby this evenin’? Look somewhere other than the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, now home to “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical” (inventive title, no?), the latest addition to Broadway’s never-ending assembly line of mindless jukebox musicals constructed around a singer-songwriter’s biggest pop hits. All of the late disco queen Donna Summer’s crowd-pleasing hits are featured, “Love to Love You Baby” to “Last Dance.” Three performers portray Summer at different stages of her life: Storm Lever (Duckling Donna), Ariana DeBose (Disco Donna) and LaChanze (Diva Donna). By strange coincidence, the upcoming Cher jukebox musical (“The Cher Show,” another inventive title) will also have three women playing a single superstar. LaChanze lends a dynamic leading presence, including a big voice and a weathered, but unfazed and jocular attitude, which contrasts nicely with the vulnerability expressed by Lever and DeBose.

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April 23, 2018

There’s a blink-and-you-miss-it visual joke in Summer: The Donna Summer Musical, dropped in while the title character is belting “No More Tears (Enough is Enough),” the disco anthem in which two take-charge women with killer pipes and a funky bass line vow to kick out the deadbeat men dragging them down. As often happens in this show with a protagonist in triplicate, the song is performed as a double-Donna duet. But Summer’s original partner on the 1979 hit does make a cameo appearance. When a hard-to-shake lover who has followed her from Munich to the Hollywood Hills shows up and starts smacking her around, Donna lays him out by socking him in the jaw with a Barbra Streisand coffee-table book. Finally, the perfect use for those hefty vanity tomes! Sadly, that’s one of the few decent jokes in this tacky little show, a feebly dramatized Wikipedia page with lackluster covers, which was rushed to Broadway following a fall tryout at La Jolla Playhouse that received mostly tepid reviews. And yet it shows no sign of improvements having been attempted. Heaven knows it’s not the way it should be. Why is there a wink-wink moment in a domestic violence scene? Well, at least it’s consistent with a musical that sprinkles groan-inducing laugh lines like a Borscht Belt comedian, regardless of the dramatic context. How to follow childhood sexual abuse, born again Christian enlightenment, a terminal cancer diagnosis and a half-assed acknowledgment of the devastating losses of AIDS? Duh, with a tasteless insinuation that Donna spent much time on her knees for purposes other than praying, of course.

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April 23, 2018

The biographical show kicks off with “The Queen Is Back” and “I Feel Love” and LaChanze as “Diva Donna,” the eldest of three “Donnas” in the production, addressing the audience and suggesting we’d be seeing “the concert of a lifetime.” Soon, we’re introduced to “Disco Donna” (Ariana DeBose) writhing through recording “Love to Love You Baby” in a studio in Germany and young LaDonna Adrian Gaines — aka “Duckling Donna” (Storm Lever) — performing for family and neighbors in her living room and at church. From there, the 100-minute show begins flying through key moments in Summer’s life, spotlighting highlights but not dancing around the low points like her drug use, financial battles with her record label, and a controversy around comments she reportedly made in the early ’90s regarding the AIDS epidemic. During the performance I attended, the audience reached a breaking point about midway through and could no longer just tap and bop to the familiar tracks, and they began to sing along with “Heaven Knows” and “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough).” Not surprisingly, that participation reaches a fever pitch during the final two numbers and stood up to dance as disco ball-shaped confetti rains down (and if you can’t guess what that last song is, you haven’t been paying attention).

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April 23, 2018

The biographical jukebox musical — of which “Jersey Boys” provides a shining example, thanks to all the Brylcreem — is the cockroach of Broadway. It has a small head, a primitive nervous system and will probably outlast the apocalypse.

Even by that standard, “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical,” which opened on Monday at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, is a blight. Despite the exciting vocalism of a cast led by the formidable LaChanze, it reduces the late Queen of Disco and pioneer of electronica to a few factoids and song samples that make her seem profoundly inconsequential. You could learn more (and more authentically) by reading a thoughtful obituary while listening to her hits — “Hot Stuff,” “Last Dance,” “She Works Hard for the Money,” among many others — online.

But then you would not be contributing to the music publishing enterprise that keeps jukebox musicals coming no matter how hard they get stomped on by critics.

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April 23, 2018

Anyone who worked as hard for her money – and for a professional respect that came too late – as Donna Summer did deserves so much more than this. A jukebox musical that could undo all the genre rehab delivered by superior shows built around Carole King and, if you want to stretch the definition a bit to include Lazarus, David Bowie, Broadway’s Summer: The Donna Summer Musical, opening tonight, is as unimaginative as its title.

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