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      ‘What the Constitution Means to Me’ Is This Season’s Most-Staged Play

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      Heidi Schreck’s play will have at least 16 productions around the country; last season’s most-produced play, “Clyde’s,” came in second.“What the Constitution Means to Me,” a challenging exploration of American legal history sparked by a student oratory competition, will be the most produced play at U.S. theaters this season, according to a survey released on Wednesday.The play, written by Heidi Schreck, will have at least 16 productions around the country, according to a count by American Theater magazine.The magazine conducts an annual survey of theaters to determine which shows, and which playwrights, are most popular. Productions of “A Christmas Carol” and works by Shakespeare, which are always widely staged, are excluded. The survey covers theaters that are members of the Theater Communications Group, the national nonprofit organization that publishes the magazine.“What the Constitution Means to Me” was staged on Broadway in 2019, with Schreck starring, and it was filmed for Amazon. (The play has a three-person cast, including a young person who debates the lead actress about the merits of the Constitution.)A production is now running at the Copley Theater in Aurora, Ill.; productions just closed at Main Street Theater in Houston, Syracuse Stage in New York, Capital Repertory Theater in Albany and Ensemble Theater Cincinnati. Other productions are planned at theaters including New Stage Theater in Jackson, Miss.Last season’s most-produced play, “Clyde’s” by Lynn Nottage, remains quite popular — it came in second this season, with at least 14 productions, and Nottage is the nation’s most-produced playwright, with 22 productions overall.Among the other most-staged plays this season are “POTUS,” by Selina Fillinger, and “The Lehman Trilogy,” by Stefano Massini.The complete lists of most-produced plays and most-produced playwrights are online at AmericanTheatre.org. More

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      Steven Lutvak, Whose Darkly Comic Show Won a Tony, Dies at 64

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      He wrote several musicals without attracting much notice. Then he struck Broadway gold with “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder.”Steven Lutvak, a composer and lyricist whose only Broadway show, “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder” — a black comedy about a killer in London who bumps off the relatives who stand in the way of his becoming a wealthy royal — won the Tony Award for best musical, died on Oct. 9 at his work studio in Manhattan. He was 64.The cause was a pulmonary embolism, said Michael McGowan, his husband.Over the years, Mr. Lutvak wrote several musicals that were staged in regional theaters and Off Off Broadway. But none were nearly as successful as “A Gentleman’s Guide.”Set in Edwardian England, it is the story of Monty Navarro, a poor man who, after learning that he is a distant relative of the rich D’Ysquith clan (and then being denied a claim to its lineage), kills the eight kinfolk (all played by one actor) in the line of succession between him and the head of the family, the Ninth Earl of Highhurst.The show opened in November 2013 and ran for 905 performances over more than two years.In his review in The New York Times, Charles Isherwood said that the score — Mr. Lutvak wrote the music and collaborated on the lyrics with Robert L. Freedman — “establishes itself as one of the most accomplished (and probably the most literate) to be heard on Broadway in the past dozen years or so, since the less rigorous requirements of pop songwriting have taken over.”“A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder” was nominated for 10 Tonys in 2014 — Mr. Lutvak and Mr. Freedman were nominated for original score — and won for Mr. Freedman’s book, Darko Tresnjak’s direction and Linda Cho’s costume design, as well as for best musical.“Steve was a gifted composer, lyricist and musician, but more than anything he was a born storyteller,” Mr. Freedman said by phone. “I was able to speak to him in my own language about story, plot and characters in a way that not every composer can do.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please More

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      ‘Suffs’ Heads to Broadway With Hillary Clinton as a Producer

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      The musical, about early-20th-century efforts to win the right to vote for women, will open in April at the Music Box Theater.She has been a first lady, a United States senator, a secretary of state, a Democratic nominee for president, and, most recently, a podcaster and a Columbia University professor.Now Hillary Rodham Clinton is adding some razzle-dazzle to her résumé: She’s becoming a Broadway producer.Clinton has joined the team backing “Suffs,” a new musical about the women’s suffrage movement, as has Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner. The producing team announced Wednesday that the show, which had an Off Broadway run last year at the Public Theater, will transfer to Broadway in the spring, opening at the Music Box Theater on April 18.“Suffs” explores the early-20th-century struggle for women’s voting rights in the United States; the dramatic tension involves an intergenerational struggle over how best to hasten political change. The musical is a longtime passion project for the singer-songwriter Shaina Taub, who wrote the book, music and lyrics; Taub also starred in the Off Broadway production, but casting for the Broadway run has not yet been announced.The musical is being directed by Leigh Silverman (“Violet”); the lead producers are Jill Furman (“Hamilton”) and Rachel Sussman (“Just for Us”). The show is being capitalized for up to $19.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; Furman said the actual budget will be $19 million.The Off Broadway production of “Suffs” opened to mixed reviews; in The New York Times, the critic Maya Phillips wrote that “the whole production feels so attuned to the gender politics and protests of today, so aware of possible critiques that it takes on its subject with an overabundance of caution.” But “Suffs” sold well, and Taub and the rest of the creative team have been reworking the show over the past year.“We’ve done a lot of work on it — we’ve listened to the critics, and we listened to the audiences,” Furman said. In the months since the Public run, Furman and Sussman added, Taub has rewritten some songs, distilled the book, removed recitative and shortened the running time. “We feel really confident in what we’ve created,” Sussman said.The lead producers said Clinton and Yousafzai would be ambassadors for the show, helping to promote it as well as offering input.Clinton is a lifelong theater fan who, in the years since her bid for president, has become a frequent Broadway (and sometimes Off Broadway) theatergoer. Last year, a special performance of “Suffs” was held to raise money for groups including Onward Together, which she co-founded to support progressive causes and candidates; Clinton attended and participated in a talkback.Yousafzai, an advocate for women’s education, also saw the show, and called it “amazing.”“Suffs” is joining what is shaping up to be a robust season for new musicals on Broadway: It is the 11th new musical to announce an opening this season, with at least a few more still expected.“The season is very crowded, and we recognize that,” Furman said, “but we think there is a market for this kind of story.” More

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      ‘All the Devils’ Review: Patrick Page Investigates Evil

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      In this Off Broadway production, the actor is most fascinated by human fallibility and Shakespeare’s nuanced understanding of it.The events of the world trail us into the theater always. There is no separating a live performance from the moment in which we experience it, not even if the words an actor speaks were written hundreds of years ago.What a powerful time, then, to encounter Shakespeare’s Shylock in Patrick Page’s solo-show investigation of evil, “All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain.”Because Shylock, the Jewish moneylender who infamously demands a pound of flesh in “The Merchant of Venice,” is, if a villain, a complicated one: persecuted, spit upon and scorned by Christians for being a Jew. But even in his bitterness, he recognizes that he and they are similar in almost every respect, because they are all human.“And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” he says. “If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.”It is impossible, or it was for me, not to think of the horrors in Israel and Gaza with Page embodying Shylock there before us. In that context, Shylock’s words hit hard — yet his argument, like his “ancient grudge” born of humiliations, might have belonged to an ordinary person on either side of that conflict. Such is the prismatic nature of theater, that great instrument of empathy, and such is the capaciousness of Page’s performance.Rest assured, though, that most of “All the Devils” is much less fraught, and a lot of it is fun. Page, whose resonant bass helped make him such an entrancingly sinister Hades in “Hadestown,” practically twinkles here between scenes of malevolence.Directed by Simon Godwin at the DR2 Theater in Manhattan, Page begins the show by channeling a bloodthirsty Lady Macbeth. But when the monologue ends and the lights go up, Page snaps back to himself, looking absolutely delighted.“Do those words frighten you?” he asks, his inviting warmth immediately banishing my fear that “All the Devils” might be a tough-guy exercise like the British actor Steven Berkoff’s “Shakespeare’s Villains,” a solo show that once traversed some of the same terrain.Page is a friendlier guide, charmingly unintimidating and even a little dishy about Shakespeare, tracing the playwright’s game-changing development as a writer of psychologically complex evildoers. Referring to a leg injury he suffered while taking a bow early in the run — Page has been temporarily using a cane — he jocularly blamed the curse of “Macbeth,” a superstition much cherished in the theater.On a set by Arnulfo Maldonado that blends the lush and the austere, “All the Devils” doesn’t always have the precision that it might. As Page slips into role after role, depth sometimes goes missing.But the show, an earlier version of which was presented online in 2021, is smartly structured and frequently fascinating, as in a scene between Othello — honorable, deep-voiced — and Iago, feigning guilelessness, whom Page gives a lighter tone. His Malvolio, more narcissist than villain, is comic, then moving; his Ariel, not villainous at all, is ethereal and excellent.Hamlet’s murderous uncle, Claudius, appears in his most conscience-stricken moment; Angelo, from “Measure for Measure,” in a confrontation that, to my mind at least, is utterly conscience-free.“Who will believe thee, Isabel?” Angelo says to the young woman whom he is trying to power play into having sex with him.Page is interested in the intersection between evil and sociopathy, which he began considering when he first played Iago. But human fallibility — and Shakespeare’s nuanced understanding of it — grips him even more.Quoting the line from “The Tempest” that gives the show its title, Page says: “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”At that “here,” he places a hand softly on his heart. Where there is evil, it lies within.All The Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented The VillainThrough Jan. 7 at DR2 Theater, Manhattan; allthedevilsplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      ‘The Lights Are On’ Review: Catastrophizing About the Future

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      Time — and a whole lot more — stands still in Owen Panettieri’s static drama about a doomsday prepper.Owen Panettieri’s play “The Lights Are On” offers a dispiriting preview of what many of our homes may look like in the future.The muddled play, a co-production of New Light Theater Project and Embeleco Unlimited, takes place in the living quarters of Liz (Danielle Ferland), a doomsday prepper who spends her days pacing about her storm-boarded house, examining sundry supplies and sorting jars of canned food. Five years earlier, Hurricane Prudence ravaged her home. “Afterwards, there wasn’t a lot worth saving. It all had to go,” she matter-of-factly tells her neighbor Trish (Jenny Bacon).The play begins when a discombobulated Trish visits Liz because she thinks someone may have broken into her home. The two haven’t spoken in seven years, yet nothing in Sarah Norris’s direction conveys a sense of estrangement. Instead, simply hearing Liz’s voice seems to lower Trish’s blood pressure by several degrees, and soon they are chatting as easily as if Trish had stopped by for a coffee chat after Sunday services.Initially, the pair present a study in contrasts: Trish, with her silk top and expensive haircut, comes from inherited wealth, whereas Liz, with her loosefitting flannel shirt and mom jeans, is working class. Yet as they catch up and catastrophize about the world, certain selfish similarities between the two women emerge. Trish has always been too preoccupied with her own life to consider the needs of her neighbor; during Hurricane Prudence, she refused to admit Liz and her son, Nathan (Marquis Rodriguez), into the safety of her home. For her part, Liz has turned her house “into a prison” for herself and her son, Trish notes.An ambient sense of the uncanny pervades the play, but the purpose is unclear. What to make of the fact that only Trish can hear something pawing at plaster? Why is a knob on a cabinet affixed to the wrong side? Why do characters refer to nonexistent “food on the stove” and mistake tea for wine? And any tension the play accrues is repeatedly dispelled by retirement-ready stereotypes of the hysterical woman (Trish) and ball-and-chain mother (Liz).Panettieri’s vision of capitalism is also cartoonish, whether the absurd “Transformers”-sounding names of the giant corporations Trionics and Meglamax or the fanciful notion that Liz herself has a capitalist streak. She has a side hustle selling provisions at “very reasonable” markups, according to Nathan, but we never see her take orders from customers, print packing slips or prepare items for shipment. The range of stuff overtaking her kitchen like kudzu does not appear to be for sale, but stockpiled in case of an apocalyptic event. Which might as well have arrived at the end of the play’s 95 molasses-slow minutes. While Panettieri’s drama has no trouble imagining the end of the world, imagining convincing characters is a tougher task.The Lights Are OnThrough Nov. 11 at Theater Row, Manhattan; newlighttheaterproject.com. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More

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      A Play Revisits the Making of ‘Death of a Salesman’ in Mandarin

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      A new Off Broadway production explores how Arthur Miller led a 1983 collaboration in Beijing that brought his work to a new audience.In 1983, Arthur Miller faced a herculean task: staging his 1949 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Death of a Salesman,” in Chinese, with an all-Chinese cast and crew, in Beijing.But questions kept popping up: Would this drama about the American dream translate for a Chinese audience? Would concepts like “traveling salesman” or “life insurance” make sense to a people who had little exposure to either?Rehearsals became exercises in cross-cultural exchange. At one point, Miller instructed his cast to abandon the wigs — he didn’t need them to impersonate Americans.“The way to make this play most American is to make it most Chinese,” he told them, according to his 1984 book about the undertaking, “Salesman in Beijing.” He added, “One of my main motives in coming here is to try to show that there is only one humanity.”The play eventually drew rapturous audiences to dozens of performances in Beijing, Hong Kong and Singapore, and was a watershed for U.S.-China cultural relations.Forty years later, the process of staging that production is the subject of the Off Broadway play “Salesman之死,” running through Oct. 28 at the Connelly Theater in the East Village. (The 之死 of the title, pronounced Zhisi, means “death of.”) Directed by Michael Leibenluft and written by Jeremy Tiang, the bilingual play centers on a young Chinese professor, Shen Huihui, who interprets for Miller during rehearsals, trying to translate for the cast ideas like “the American dream.”“What would happen if we did try to find a way to work together, rather than just sticking to our own patch of language and culture?” said the playwright Jeremy Tiang, left, with the director Michael Leibenluft.Ye Fan for The New York TimesBy spotlighting the linguistic and cultural misunderstandings between the American playwright and his Chinese collaborators, the new play explores the challenging dynamics that arose when the two cultures converged.“This play is an example of international cross-cultural collaboration I fear we don’t see enough of,” Tiang said during a video call. “What would happen if we did try to find a way to work together, rather than just sticking to our own patch of language and culture?”Tiang drew on interviews with the original production’s cast and crew, as well as the book in which Miller recounts traveling to China at the invitation of Ying Ruocheng, one of China’s leading actors and directors, and the playwright Cao Yu.China had only recently emerged from its Cultural Revolution — the Maoist movement that targeted intellectuals and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people — and its government had adopted a new foreign policy of openness to the West. Artistic projects once unthinkable under Mao Zedong suddenly become achievable.The playwright said he wrote the script based on interviews with the cast and crew of the original 1983 production as well as Miller’s memoir “Salesman in Beijing.” Ye Fan for The New York TimesThe real-life Shen Huihui was among the first group of students to attend graduate school after the Cultural Revolution. At Peking University, Shen wrote her dissertation about Miller’s books and plays and published one of the first journal articles about Miller in Chinese. When Miller arrived in China to direct “Salesman,” Ying, who translated the script and played the protagonist, Willy Loman, asked Shen to be the rehearsal interpreter.“I was shocked,” Shen said in a recent phone interview. “Why me? There were plenty of people who were professional interpreters, and I was not a professional interpreter.”Meeting Miller was both thrilling and intimidating, said Shen, who now lives and teaches writing in Canada. She recalled a tall, broad-shouldered man who seldom smiled.Rehearsals started in March and by opening night on May 7, Miller and his collaborators had worked through numerous adjustments (and endured many a misunderstanding) on the way to staging this tale about the perils of the American dream.The show is in English and Mandarin, with supertitles for both languages.Ye Fan for The New York TimesThose cross-cultural encounters are the core of “Salesman之死,” which is being produced by Yangtze Repertory Theater in association with Gung Ho Projects; much of the play’s plot centers on the bilingual and often chaotic exchanges within the 1983 rehearsal room.Leibenluft first read “Salesman in Beijing” as an undergraduate studying theater and Chinese at Yale University. He later moved to Shanghai and began directing adaptations of American plays in China.Sandia Ang, center, as the actor Zhu Lin, who played Linda Loman in the 1983 production.Ye Fan for The New York TimesIn 2017, he hosted a workshop to explore possibilities for turning “Salesman in Beijing” into a play. Tiang was among the writers and directors who attended, and he soon started writing a script.The show eventually opted for an all-female cast, which “highlights the women who are part of this history and who are often overlooked,” Leibenluft said on a video call. On a recent Thursday, cast members huddled around a table in a rehearsal room in Midtown Manhattan. (Five of the six actors are immigrants from China and Taiwan and are fluent in English and Chinese.) Sonnie Brown, a Korean American actor who plays Arthur Miller, barked out instructions, while Jo Mei, who plays Shen Huihui, translated them into Chinese. (The show, in English and Mandarin, has supertitles in both languages.)The play is “so hopeful,” Mei said, describing it as a reminder of people’s common humanity: Everyone, whether Willy Loman or a shopkeeper in China, suffers the same disappointments, shares the same dreams.“It says so much about how as different as you think you are, the themes and humanity are so similar and universal,” she said. “The more different or specific, the more universal is what I think Miller and Ying were trying to get at.” More

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      Tituss Burgess Thinks ‘Golden Girls’ Reruns Get Funnier as You Age

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      Returning to Broadway for “Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” the actor shares his love for dishing during a haircut and comes out as a pluviophile.When he was a child, Tituss Burgess went with his mother to see “Your Arms Too Short to Box With God” at the Fox Theater in Atlanta. The musical made a lasting impression. “The sheer exhilaration and reckless abandon with which Stephanie Mills performed has stayed with me forever,” he said in a video interview from his New Jersey apartment, across the Hudson River from Harlem.Similarly formative experiences included “The Wiz” on a VHS tape and “Rent.” Burgess has not forgotten how they made him feel. “Every time I’m onstage, it’s someone’s first time experiencing the magic that all those greats gave me,” he said, “and I must deliver the way that they did.”Burgess certainly has plenty to work with in “Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” in which he is playing the master of ceremony Harold Zidler through Dec. 17. It is, he said, “one of the wackiest, most conniving, most fun roles I’ve ever seen outside of Fagin in ‘Oliver!’”This is his first Broadway outing since his stint as Nicely-Nicely Johnson in the 2009 revival of “Guys and Dolls.” But that does not mean that he stayed away from theatrical roles in the interim: He earned five Emmy Award nominations for his performance as the Broadway-aspiring actor Titus Andromedon in “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” and played the slightly sinister narrator in Season 2 of “Schmigadoon!” — a perfect segue into his new job in “Moulin Rouge!”Burgess, 44, talked about some of his pick-me-ups and revealed his secret ingredient in the kitchen. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1NapsIt’s a lost art form. I have no troubles taking naps: It could be on the train, it could be in an Uber. I suspect when I get the show’s schedule under my belt, some delicious naptime will be built into it.2RainI’ve been a pluviophile all my life. I don’t know what it is about rain, but I just feel my most calm, my most connected to source. I love it so much. From my balcony when there’s a gust of wind with some water in it — woof! It’s exciting. It doesn’t inconvenience me the way some people experience precipitation.3‘The Golden Girls’Those four ladies and the writers together made television magic. It’s like a fine wine: The jokes somehow are even funnier now, or I’m just getting older and maybe I understand the references a little more. On some level, every creator can reference it as a source of inspiration. For me, TV’s never been funnier.4N.Y.C.’s SkylineFew things excite me and calm me down as when the plane is descending into one of our local airports and that beautiful skyline is there waiting, saying, “Welcome home.”5Renée FlemingThere aren’t enough superlatives to describe her magic and her seamless approach to every genre. The first thing I saw her do, with the San Francisco Opera, was André Previn’s adaptation of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” She has this one aria called “I Want Magic”: Oh, dear Lord. She brings me a great deal of joy, and each listen is a lesson.6BroadwayThere’s something unique about the intersection of all of these art forms coming together to tell different stories. And then to watch Broadway transform and remake itself again and again and again — I don’t know anything outside of cinema that has the ability to recreate itself so seamlessly.7My DogsMy babies. Micah is 10, and Hans is 8, and they have the energy of puppies — I guess it’s all the love. They’ve been keeping me sane. [Hans climbs over Burgess on the couch.] He thinks he’s a star. He is the center of attention. Both of them are from the ASPCA. I much prefer my furry friends to humans.8Truffle OilI don’t claim to be some master chef, and I hate to follow directions, both recipes and in life, but I love to cook. A dash of truffle goes a very, very long way, and I put it on just about anything. It can turn a disaster into a masterpiece.9My Barbers (Both of Them)I always know when I’m due for a haircut, and it’s not the length of my hair — it’s when my heart is full and I have a lot to talk about. I highly recommend finding a barber that knows your heart as well as your head. I will admit I have two that I rotate and I tell each one different things.10Gospel MusicI grew up in the church. Being in New York, I got in and out of relationships, but at the end of the day, the one thing that seems to serve as a reminder of who I am and how I got here, and what formed my earliest connections to source material and to humans, is gospel music. So I return to it as often as I can. It’s a great reset for me. When I’m done talking to you, I’ll probably put some on. More

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      ‘Gutenberg! The Musical!’ Review: Revenge of the Broadway Nerds

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      The history of movable type is a terrible idea for a show. Which is why it’s so on brand for this satire of theater and its eternal hopefuls.I know we could all use a good laugh nowadays. But would you settle for a thousand chuckles?Because that’s what “Gutenberg! The Musical!” is offering. In the two-man, 20-character skit of a show that opened Thursday evening on Broadway, the jokes are abundant, interchangeable and lightweight: comedy as packing peanuts.If that suggests an inconsequential payload, well, perhaps consequential was not what the writers, Scott Brown and Anthony King, and the director, Alex Timbers, were after. Silliness crossed with satire seems to be their target, and with the help of two expert farceurs, Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells, they do hit the silliness bull’s-eye. The satire, I’m not so sure.But let’s enjoy what we can. Gad plays Bud Davenport and Rannells is Doug Simon, loserish 40-something co-workers at a nursing home in New Jersey. Bitten by the Broadway bug, they decide to collaborate on a musical, despite a rudimentary knowledge of the genre and an advanced lack of talent. When Bud, the sweaty, impulsive one, inherits money from an uncle who recently started (and then suddenly stopped) hang gliding, they get their chance: They rent the James Earl Jones Theater for a bare-bones reading in hopes of acquiring a backer. Doug, the button-down one with the toggle-switch smile, chips in by selling his parents’ house.What we see on the stage of the Jones is the deliberately horrible result. Bud has written the music and Doug the book (and both of them the lyrics) for a show about the 15th-century German inventor who gives the show its title. Having discovered from a Google search that reliable information about Gutenberg is “scant,” Bud and Doug are relieved of the responsibility to historical truth that is apparently so burdensome to the creators of most biomusicals. About the inventor of movable type, they can make everything — not just most of it — up.So their Gutenberg is, counterfactually, a “wine presser” in the nonexistent town of Schlimmer; his wine press is what inspires his printing press. (“I’m gonna take the grapes out and put letters in,” he sings. “Put letters where them grapes have been.”) But a mad monk who is not a fan of literacy denounces the new technology and leads the townsfolk to burn its inventor at the stake. A familiar moral is drawn from that fake history: “Gutenberg’s death did not stop his dream,” a laborer steps out of time to tell us.Or rather, Doug does, because he and Bud, having spent all their money on the rental of the theater, were unable to afford a cast. Instead, with the help of 99 custom-printed trucker hats to identify the dramatis personae, and another 25 that become a kind of puppet chorus line, they narrate the show and play all the characters in it. These include Dead Baby, Beef Fat Trimmer, Feces, Two Drunks, Antisemitic Flower Girl and of course the printer’s love interest, a wench named Helvetica. Her big number (sung by Bud, petting his imaginary tresses) is “I Can’t Read.”Rannells and Gad are expert farceurs, but the show’s silliness eventually wears itself out.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesGad and Rannells, a Mutt and Jeff team since they starred in “The Book of Mormon” in 2011, couldn’t be better. Gad’s weird combination of bluster and insecurity (he twitches a lot) makes Bud almost two-dimensional; Rannells, with his golden retriever gloss and whirring-computer energy, takes Doug most of the way from conceit to character. Together they land every joke.But with more than two hours of can-you-bottom-this yucks, it’s exhausting work — for them and for us. As a distraction, Timbers provides innumerable bits of clever stage business, seldom involving anything fancier than mime, sound effects and simple props. At one point the two men, just by switching hats and poses, somehow perform a four-part chorale. At another, Gutenberg’s big moment of inspiration is capped with the firing of what you might call a confetti popper, except that “confetti” implies plural. Here there is approximately one confett.Even so, the nifty bits soon start to seem compensatory. (When in doubt, hit the big red “Fog” button.) Even the hats wear out their welcome as we wait for a turn in the story that will have some meaningful effect on the cheery, woebegone souls who wear them.That turn never comes. Despite the arrival of a third character played at most performances by a guest star — Cynthia Erivo, Jonathan Groff and F. Murray Abraham so far among them — Bud and Doug are still the same sad sacks at the end as they were at the beginning. Perhaps that wouldn’t be a problem if the show were just 45 minutes long, as it was in its original one-act incarnation, at the Upright Citizens Brigade in 2003. (By 2006, when it ran for a few months Off Broadway, it had grown a second act.) Pythonesque sketch comedy thrives in a tight, humble frame.Without it, the silliness wears itself out. And since the printing press story was never more than a beaten-to-death MacGuffin, that leaves “Gutenberg! The Musical!” as just another satire of musical theater and its eternal hopefuls. Here the problem is not excess but triteness; the tropes of sincere incompetence and pathetic ambition are too familiar, if expertly carried out. They have been flogged so much — and often more wittily, in musicals like “[title of show]” — that they do not respond much to the whip anymore.This problem partly stems from what may have been a deliberate form-fails-function choice to put nothing onstage that would seem more skillful than what Bud and Doug could have written themselves. So the songs, accompanied by a trio called the Middlesex Six, are never more than the dittyish retreads you might expect from an untrained doodler like Bud. And aside from the jokes, which exist only outside of the “Gutenberg” story, and at the expense of the two men within it, this Broadway musical’s book might as well be Doug’s.For better or worse, that’s the writers’ premise — “We tried to come up with, like, what’s a terrible idea for a musical?” King told Alexis Soloski in The New York Times. And you can’t say that premise isn’t maintained with discipline from top to bottom: the dollar-store stage set by Scott Pask, the clumsy high school movement by Nancy Renee Braun and especially the on-the-nose costumes by Emily Rebholz. Gad in a dad tie and Rannells with his argyle sweater vest tucked into his cuffed pants are somehow funny without further elaboration.Alas, everything else does get elaborated: “We fell in love with our own dumb stuff,” King also told The Times.Fair enough, but two hours is a tad long for lovemaking. If I cannot therefore give “Gutenberg! The Musical!” my heart, I’ll at least give it a confett.Gutenberg! The Musical!Through Jan. 28 at the James Earl Jones Theater, Manhattan; gutenbergbway.com. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. More