'Honeymoon in Vegas': Theater Review
In the 1992 screen comedy Honeymoon in Vegas, Nicolas Cage gets over his prolonged wedding jitters and flies exasperated fiancée Sarah Jessica Parker to Nevada to tie the knot, only to risk losing her to shady professional gambler James Caan, who sees her as a dead ringer for his dear departed wife. It's the kind of innocuous fluff you more likely saw as an in-flight movie or cable rerun than in a theater, if at all. Certainly, the feeble business through two months of previews for this stage musical adaptation — including the lucrative holiday period — indicates that it's on few folks' favorite movie lists.
The good news is that the musical is a lot better than its commercial struggle suggests. It's breezy and fun, full of toe-tapping numbers, witty design touches and frequent bursts of irreverent comic inspiration. But it sputters after a tremendously entertaining first act. Despite the effusive reviews that greeted its tryout run at New Jersey's Paper Mill Playhouse in fall 2013, encouraging producers to make the move to Manhattan, this is a 2½-hour musical with maybe 90 minutes' worth of decent material. Its frothiness is initially enjoyable until it becomes silly and then tiresome, before sparking back to life toward the end. Ultimately, the show feels slight
