Yet another Broadway-musical-based-on-a-film premiered last Thursday, this one with a unique pedigree: Cry-Baby, based on arch B-movie king John Waters’ movie, with songs by David Javerbaum (a writer and producer for The Daily Show) and Adam Schlesinger, a bassist from the pop group Fountains of Wayne. Strangers before the show, Javerbaum and Schlesinger were paired together by the show's producers to write an irreverent, comic songbook. So, how'd they do?

Ben Brantley of the New York Times says the music "include[s] plenty of rockabilly riffs and soulful wails (for a Little Richard-like character played by Chester Gregory II), but they often feel stuck in a groove, repeated until they go dry. Only the closing number, 'Nothing Bad’s Ever Gonna Happen Again,' a sendup of the innate optimism of both the 1950s and the musical comedy, has any original spark." As a whole, Brantley says, "this show in search of an identity has all the saliva-stirring properties of week-old pre-chewed gum."

New York magazine’s Jeremy McCarter writes that the songwriters "prove themselves nifty lyricists, particularly in a nut-job girl’s ballad, ‘Screw Loose’ (‘Darlin’ it’s so/Hard to be sixteen and schizo’)," but has a similar complaint to Brantley. "Like plenty of musicals lately, it doesn’t try very hard to work up genuine emotion—nor does its audience expect it to. Artists and playgoers have struck some weird deal whereby a lack of real feeling is acceptable as long as it’s played for a laugh."

Finally, Clive Barnes of The New York Post writes that Cry-Baby suffers in comparisons to the first, and perhaps more successful, John Waters transplant Hairspray. Of the new production, Barnes laments "the music comes in two rocky flavors - cheery and droopy. It's the kind of music that makes you wonder whether you've heard it before, just before you stop caring . . . The edgy lyrics are altogether superior, more stupidly witty than amiably silly. As one of the show's bad girls sings, ‘I can hold up a bank using only my face/I'm the nastiest creature you ever did see/On Halloween, I dress up as me.'"