Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
Opening Night: November 4, 2010
Closing: January 2, 2011
Theater: Belasco Theatre
Based on Pedro Almodóvar’s 1988 film, the musical considers the plight of an actress whose lover has left her, putting into motion a dizzying set of complications, farcical comedy and some pretty potent gazpacho.
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November 4, 2010
Recipe for a commodity musical: (1) Take an ultrafamiliar piece of source material, preferably a hit movie; (2) adapt it for the stage in the most literal and obvious way imaginable, adding only extra jokes; (3) stir in a dozen or so innocuous songs that won’t divert the audience’s attention from how closely the stage version resembles its source. If you’re lucky, you get "The Addams Family"; if not, "9 to 5." Either way, you get the kind of been-there-seen-that musical that has been blighting Broadway for the past decade and more.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 4, 2010
No one, or nothing, seems to stay put in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (**½ out of four), the new musical adaptation of Pedro Almodo´var’s 1988 film.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 4, 2010
Musicals sprung from movies are usually a recipe for freeze-dried nostalgia served over songs. But when I heard that “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” Pedro Almodóvar’s sparkling international breakthrough film from 1988 about romantic resiliency, was getting a Broadway makeover, my heart fluttered with hope that this might be one of those rare instances when the screen catapults the stage to giddy new heights.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 4, 2010
A musical based on Pedro Almodovar’s gorgeous film "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" opened Thursday at the Belasco Theatre with all the elements to make that classic Spanish soup, but still in need of seasoning.
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November 4, 2010
They’re giving out the wrong drug at the Belasco Theater, where “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” opened on Thursday night. As in the 1988 Pedro Almodóvar movie that inspired this star-jammed musical, Valium is consumed in large quantities by many characters. That is so pharmaceutically irresponsible. What this production needs — immediately and intravenously — is Ritalin.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 5, 2010
The most startling thing about Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown — the ambitious, addled, oddly enervated new musical from composer-lyricist David Yazbek (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels) and director Bartlett Sher (South Pacific) — is how tantalizingly close it comes to being a perfectly solid show. Certainly, it benefits from source-material that’s practically a musical already: filmmaker/collagist Pedro Almodóvar’s gaudy romp through liberated Madrid and the delicious, stinging thrills of modern heartbreak (“modern” being 1987, where Sher and librettist Jeffrey Lane have wisely chosen to fix the story’s time period).
READ THE REVIEWNovember 4, 2010
Heroic efforts from the remarkable singing actresses Laura Benanti, Patti LuPone and Sherie Rene Scott and the equally accomplished Brian Stokes Mitchell can’t disguise the fact that “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” is an unholy mess.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 4, 2010
It took me a while to understand my disappointment in Lincoln Center Theater’s musical adaptation of Pedro Almodóvar’s 1988 film "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown," now at the spectacularly restored Belasco Theatre. There had been much to enjoy: Jeffrey Lane’s frequently funny book, David Yazbek’s perfectly professional Latin-infused songs, a stellar cast at the top of its game, and Bartlett Sher’s fluid staging that combines with a highly imaginative physical production to capture Almodóvar’s idiosyncratic visual style and editing rhythms. Yet the show hadn’t jelled. Eventually, a light dawned. "Women" is what composer Mary Rodgers calls a "Why?" musical. It has no compelling reason to sing; it’s just the original property with songs dropped in.
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