Customer Reviews

Glory Days

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This musical has a stigma for having closed after only one performance that's just not fair. While the perspective is certainly skewed given the age and inexperience of the creative team, most people overlook the energy behind the music. This isn't a work of genius but it's a lot of fun and a great, youthful, pop opera. It's also done in a style that I feel doesn't get the respect in musical theater circles that it deserves. It's an exercise in realism, there isn't a lot of imagery or abstract language and the music is largely plot-driven rather than introspective. But it's definitely not a bad thing, it's just different.

So much can happen in one night.

Such is the concept behind GLORY DAYS, which debuted and closed in one night in 2008. Listening to the CD, it is easy to appreciate why the producers were excited about launching the production on the Great White Way -- the musical is the perfect antidote to the exhausting parade of both movies-turned-musicals and over-the-top visual extravaganzas.

Unfortunately, it is also easy to understand how a cavernous theatre could swallow the intimate production, portrayed with refreshing reality by its four actors -- Steven Booth, Andrew C. Hall, Adam Halpin, and Jesse JP Johnson.

The score - penned with heartbreaking honesty by Nick Blaemire - introduces us to four best buddies who reunite after their freshman year in college. We hear them struggle as they resist or accept change and face maturating and accepting life as it is and not how one wishes it to be.

Fortunately, this slice-of-life avoids stilted and forced dialogue as many musicals before it have suffered; the friends' verbal exchanges are credible and relatable.

Hopefully, this charming muscial will be re-discovered so it can enjoy more than one night of glory.

Glad to have it as a piece of recorded stage history. Tuneful, lively, almost memorable.

It's easy to say that this show failed on Broadway because it belonged in a smaller theatre, but I've seen it in a smaller theatre and it's just not very good. The writing is too "on the nose." Instead of showing us who these guys are and how they interact, the lyrics tell us--and tell us and tell us. The music is uninspired and these young characters have nothing new to say. People grow apart--true, but hardly news, and not enough to hang a script on.