Theater Obituary: MARK BROKAW (A Tribute to the Director’s “Cry-Baby” on Broadway)

In Praise of a Misjudged Misfit:
Mark Brokaw and the Undeserved Fate of Cry-Baby

In the wake of director Mark Brokaw‘s untimely passing at 65 yesterday, I find myself returning not to one of his celebrated triumphs, such as How I Learned to Drive, but to a show that critics swatted away with a smirk and a shrug. When Cry-Baby opened on Broadway in 2008, it was met with baffled disdain, as though the production had interrupted a more respectable conversation. The reviews arrived as if prewritten, eyes already rolled. What a pity. And what a mistake.

Elizabeth Stanley and cast

There are few things as fragile as a musical comedy that asks to be taken seriously on its own ridiculous terms. Cry-Baby, adapted from John Waters’ 1990 film of the same name, never begged for reverence. It wanted only to misbehave. And in that act of glorious misbehavior, it revealed a theatrical intelligence that too many of us were too distracted, too dismissive, to see. With a winking book by Thomas Meehan and Mark O’Donnell, a sharp score by Adam Schlesinger and David Javerbaum, and Brokaw’s immaculate direction, Cry-Baby was less a flop than a misread. It did not fail. It failed because by the mood of the room.

Brokaw, always a director of rare precision and clean lines, met the chaos of Cry-Baby with a control that never dulled the mischief. He brought shape to a world teetering on the edge of caricature, grounding the satire without taming it. He knew exactly when to let the actors tilt toward absurdity and when to pull them back just before they tipped into camp. His visual storytelling was bold but unfussy, a marriage of comic book framing and lyrical counterpoint. Where others might have winked too hard or retreated behind quotation marks, Brokaw staged the show with a straight face and a gleam in the eye. He trusted the material. He gave it integrity. That is no small thing.

James Snyder, Elizabeth Stanley and cast

The book, which was tossed aside by many at the time, deserves fresh attention. It has rhythm, snap, and a peculiar kind of grace. Meehan and O’Donnell understood that parody works best when it believes in the thing it sends up. Their dialogue captures the breathless earnestness of 1950s melodrama while slipping in jokes so sharp they leave marks. The show’s heroine is named Allison but she might as well have been named Irony. The plot, about a good girl who falls for a misunderstood delinquent, is not a satire of teen angst so much as a critique of the fear that surrounds it. For all its silliness, Cry-Baby has ideas. It has teeth.

And then there was the score. In a Broadway season that offered little in the way of genuine musical surprise, Schlesinger and Javerbaum delivered a collection of songs that both honored and mocked their inspirations. They played with genre like jazz musicians play with standards. The rockabilly rhythms, the teen ballad swoons, the doo wop harmonies: they were familiar, yes, but never lazy. “Screw Loose,” a solo that could have coasted on its title alone, became a manic aria of self-declared instability. “Nobody Gets Me” was somehow both heartbreaking and absurd, a confession sung with perfect deadpan intensity. Even now, the score holds up as a smart, tuneful love letter to the anxieties of adolescence and the absurdities of cultural panic.

Harriet Harris and cast

Compared to the original film, the stage version had more shape, more surprise, and a more generous understanding of its characters. It smoothed the roughest edges of Waters’ movie but found a more durable core of feeling. Where the film often seemed content to be outrageous, the musical reached for something stranger and more sincere. Brokaw understood that sincerity is the most unstable substance in comedy. Mishandled, it curdles. In Cry-Baby, he held it like spun glass, turning it slowly in the light until it caught fire.

Perhaps the show was doomed by its moment. It followed Hairspray, a hit that managed to keep one foot in kitsch and the other in uplift. Audiences wanted another balloon. Cry-Baby gave them a live wire. Its politics were more cynical. Its satire was bitter. Its optimism was laced with acid. It did not send the crowd home with a warm glow but with a nervous laugh. Broadway, ever fond of sentiment, may not have known what to do with a show that smiled with its teeth bared.

The cast of Cry-Baby

The failure of Cry-Baby feels particularly cruel in retrospect because it was precisely the kind of risk that Broadway claims to want but rarely rewards. Here was a musical that refused to play it safe, that chose provocation over comfort, that dared to suggest that rebellion might be more interesting than redemption. It was theater that trusted its audience to get the joke and the heartbreak simultaneously. That kind of faith is rare. That it went unrecognized feels like our collective loss.

But today, with a little distance, we can look again. And we should. In the loss of Mark Brokaw, we lost a director who knew how to balance contradiction, how to make laughter feel dangerous and style feel substantial. Cry-Baby was not his most praised production. But it may have been one of his bravest. It was certainly one of his most misunderstood. That feels, now, like a judgment worth correcting. Time has a way of making rebels into prophets. Perhaps it is time for Cry-Baby to have its day.

production photos by Joan Marcus

Cry-Baby
Marquis Theatre, 1535 Broadway
previews March 15, 2008 (45 previews; price: $35 – $54)
opened April 24, 2008 (price $35 – $120)
closed June 22, 2008 (65 performances)

Cast List:
James Snyder
Harriet Harris
Elizabeth Stanley
Carly Jibson
Chester Gregory II
Christopher Hanke
Lacey Kohl
Alli Mauzey
Cristen Page
Richard Poe
Cameron Adams
Ashley Amber
Nick Blaemire
Michael Buchanan
Eric Christian
Colin Cunliffe
Joanna Glushak
Michael D. Jablonski
Marty Lawson
Spencer Liff
Courtney Laine Mazza
Mayumi Miguel
Tory Ross
Eric Sciotto
Peter Matthew Smith
Allison Spratt
Charlie Sutton
Stacey Todd Holt

Production Credits:
Mark Brokaw (Direction)
Rob Ashford (Choreography)
Scott Pask (Scenic Design)
Catherine Zuber (Costume Design)
Howell Binkley (Lighting Design)
Peter Hylenski (Sound Design)
Lynne Shankel (Music Director)