Broadway Review: Baby It’s ... Who?

NEW YORK - A housewife from Passaic, N.J., named Florence Greenberg was a trailblazer in the '50s. First, she outsmarted the male-dominated pop record industry with her own Scepter record label. And second, the already-married Greenberg, a Jewish woman, fell in love with her talented black music producer, Luther Dixon ("Sixteen Candles," "Tonight's the Night").

But for all her home-grown savvy at the pinnacle of the music industry and her strength to stand up for herself in bucking a taboo, Greenberg would have been nothing without four black girls from a Passaic high school.

They became the Shirelles.

For a time, they were the biggest girl-group in the burgeoning popular music world, with hit after hit: "I Met Him on a Sunday," "Dedicated to the One I Love," "Soldier Boy" and more. Their story could possibly have been turned into the female version of Jersey Boys. But here's one looming problem among the many ailments that renders the new musical Baby It's You! flat as an untuned recording-studio piano: It has little to do with the Shirelles.

While Jersey Boys, a smash success, makes us feel we know all about the four singers as well as their managers and hangers-on, Baby It's You!, which opened Wednesday night on Broadway, concentrates on Florence Greenberg.

That would be fine if the musical, conceived by Floyd Mutrux and directed by Mutrux and Sheldon Epps, got under Greenberg's skin with anything but pat stage devices. But the script - by Mutrux and Colin Escott - the team behind Broadway's current Million Dollar Quartet - never approaches anything like insight.

So the women gamely singling the tunes of the Shirelles are simply warm bodies with golden voices. Except for one who has her eyes on the Greenberg's music producer in a hint of a subplot, you know as much about them at the curtain call as you do when you first take your seat at the Broadhurst Theatre: Nothing. Yet their singing mostly drives the show.

Beth Leavel (a Tony for The Drowsy Chaperone) plays Greenberg as well as she can, saddled with a pedestrian script, and she sings beautifully when she's in a low register; otherwise the sound design begins turning her to tin. Allan Louis is solid as her paramour, and the supporting cast gives it all they've got.

Baby It's You! purports to take you to the '50s - cool period images fill Jason H. Thompson's projection design. But nobody bothered to consider whether more modern lines like "how cool is that!" or references that, for instance, make Greenberg and her paramour "an item" pull an audience out of the period and into a show about, say, the Spice Girls.

The show also has an embarrassingly fairytale solution for a long and deep mother-daughter rift. Bad feelings? Intense hurt? Hmmm ... how about a little huggy? Then we go on to the next scene.

At the performance I attended, the audience cheered for snippets of popular old songs, and seemed not to care much about the piece of theater that was attempting to frame those songs. That's the sort of audiences Baby It's You! will need. As for myself, grabbing some of the records Greenberg distributed and flipping them onto a turntable would be an infinitely better night.