Review: ‘Gutenberg! The Musical!’ on Broadway is best for fans of Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells

NEW YORK — If the breathless punctuation in the title wasn’t a giveaway, “Gutenberg! The Musical!” begins with a joke about the James Earl Jones Theatre being the “the only Broadway theater named for a Sith Lord.”

If that tickles your nerdy funny bone, you’ll likely be on board all night with the double act of Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad, a self-aware reprise of Elder Price and Elder Cunningham in “The Book of Mormon,” except that Rannells and Gad now are playing Doug and Bud, a pair of lovable New Jersey dudes dreaming of writing and starring in a new Broadway musical about Johannes Gutenberg, the Jeff Bezos of 15th-century Germany.

On this quixotic endeavor, Bud has spent the inheritance left by his uncle, dead from a sky-diving accident. Doug has sold his house. This money could only afford three live musicians or, as they tell us, one half of a New Jersey wedding band known as the Middlesex Six.

I guess there is something very meta about a musical about the man who terrified the world by unleashing the possibility of mass communication and duplication being this familiar and derivative. The main gag here is that we all are attending a backer’s audition at which the neophyte authors will performing every role in the show, all while dreaming that an actual producer might be attendance and thus allow them to achieve their dreams of moving to a Broadway theater, which is, of course, where we all are sitting and where we know everything is heading.

If you’ve never had the pleasure, that’s also a key part of the equally self-referential plot of “Spamalot,” a Broadway revival of which will follow hard upon this much more modest satirical endeavor, as penned by Anthony King and Scott Brown.

Aside from a few silly songs, “Gutenberg! The Musical!” relies for its appeal mostly on the rapport of its two contrasting stars, one whose persona is that of an unimportant but earnest alpha male and the other a dweeb with a surprisingly deep emotional well from which to draw. Some preshow affection for all that is key to having a good time, as is a willingness to be impressed by comic actors playing so many different types and parts. One repeating sight gag here — funny, for sure — is that the two guys like to wear baseball caps sporting the names of their characters. By the end of the night, the show looks like the window to the Lids store at the mall.

Rannells and Gad are, of course, consummate pros very much in their mutual and collective wheelhouses here. The profoundly gifted Gad, in particular, has the ability to switch the mood of the show on a dime and whatever emotional oomph might be coming your way in a night made up mostly of gags for their own sake, it arrives from him, especially since the writing here comes with an abrasive and sometimes jarring satirical tone.

You sure wouldn’t describe “Gutenberg!” as a sweet show, anymore than you would say it was an original. In a moralistic theatrical time when edgy satire can be very dangerous for the writer, King and Brown certainly have admirable guts. But I also thought the comedy overly crude in some spots; the humor is likely to divide audiences, as was the case with “Beetlejuice,” which famously did better with real audiences than with insiders and critics. And I didn’t laugh much at some of the weird gags about antisemitism; the show would be well advised to look at those again in the light of current events.

“Gutenberg! The Musical!” certainly knows how to structure narrative gags, replete with little bits of emotion immediately followed by jokes structured so as to cut the treacle. And it does have a little scenic climax that’s well worth waiting for, and that goes at least some way toward justifying those Broadway prices for this kind of off-Broadway-style entertainment, familiar to anyone who enjoys improv and sketch comedy.

But the reality here is that this is a show relying on two skilled comic actors and their contrasting relationship. These two stars could do this kind of thing in their sleep, should they so choose, and I suspect their challenge will come from messing with each other and keeping everything fresh.

On most nights, and if they feel free to deviate a tad from the script, that will be fun for at least their fans to watch.

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(At the James Earl Jones Theatre, 138 W. 48th St., New York; gutenbergbway.com.)

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