Theatre in Review: Safety Not Guaranteed (Brooklyn Academy of Music/Harvey Theater)

	Taylor Trensch. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

"Didn't they promise us some magic?/Yeah, they did," sings one of the disenchanted band of not-quite-young adults in Safety Not Guaranteed. It's a question audience members might similarly pose at this underpowered new musical. Based on a 2012 Sundance entry, it has all the features implied by the Utah film festival's provenance: young-adult angst; snarky, flattish jokes; and an atmosphere of low-grade depression papered over a lurking sentimentality. (It was an early effort by director Colin Trevorrow, who, these, days, mostly inhabits Jurassic World.) The musical, which follows the film closely, is a low-stakes affair populated by underachievers freaked out at the prospect of turning thirty, or even (gasp!) forty.

Darius, who works, unhappily, at a magazine in Seattle, pitches a story based on a classified ad she discovered, seeking a partner for a time travel adventure. She is certain that it has the makings of a solid kook-of-the-month feature, the sort of mildly derisory piece that earns easy laughs. To her surprise, Jeff, her loutish editor, greenlights the story and insists on accompanying her to the small seaside town where the ad's author resides; little does she know Jeff sees the trip as a chance to hook up with his high school dream date, who lives there. Coming along for the ride is Arnou, their researcher, an Internet-addicted geek with big-time graduate school plans.

The trio quickly discovers that Kenneth, the would-be time traveler, is a sad loner sporting a Holden Caulfield hat in all weathers, a Shop-Rite worker who bores the customers with tidbits of theoretical physics. Jeff's attempt at befriending him is a disaster, so Darius takes over, talking Kenneth into making her his accomplice. Soon, they're having clandestine meetings, undergoing "basic training," and staging a raid on a medical research facility to steal a giant laser capable of creating the nine-hundred-thousand lumens that, Kenneth believes, will power his time machine. Hot on their heels is a pair of FBI agents, convinced that Kenneth is a bomb-building terrorist. Meanwhile, Darius, in the time-honored tradition of musicals, finds her cynicism melting even as the evidence piles up that Kenneth is delusional.

It's a solid enough premise but the execution is less than engaging because of the thinnish characters, each solely defined by his or her one big regret: Kenneth wants to return to the scene of the accident that killed his girlfriend (a claim that bears watching). Darius is haunted by her mother's early death from cancer. Jeff, frightened of impending middle age, wants to recapture his adolescence with his former sweetheart, Liz, a hairdresser with few illusions about the passage of time. (The one exception, sort of, is Arnau; little more than a nerdy-Indian joke in the film, here he gets some potential boyfriend material in the person of Tristan, a winsome local librarian -- a prospect that terrifies him.)

There's little more to say about Darius, Kenneth, et al, because Nick Blaemire's book does little to bring these paper slackers to life. The songs, by Ryan Miller, of the band Guster, are sometimes catchy but their lyrics add little to the flat characterizations. They range from the alarmingly basic ("We're losing our hair!/It doesn't seem fair!") to the maladroit ("I wanna go back/To the innocent track/Where the window ain't cracked") to the bizarrely whimsical: Jeff, trying to convince Kenneth that he, too, is interested in time travel, sings, "I'll stab a dragon/With a pocket knife/Save a damsel from the hobbits/And Han Solo/Dunk a basketball/On Jesus Christ/Ride a dinosaur/Around the world we go." With words like that, it's no wonder Kenneth wants nothing to do with him.

Who are these people? What do they want? What are their interests? Do they have families or friends? The book supplies no clues. The good news is that the songs touch on the right narrative points and, in a couple of ensemble numbers, Miller shows a knack for grouping various plot lines, swiftly moving the story forward. But the characters are a dreary lot plagued by commonplace problems.

The capable, affable cast does its best to imbue these sad cases with a modest amount of sparkle. Nkeki Obi-Melekwe is a charming presence with a strong voice who does a fairly convincing job of conveying Darius' change of heart, but the character is hard to like; her exploitation of Kenneth leaves a bad taste. Pomme Koch's, Jeff is a cartoon without a decent punch line, but he puts over his numbers with enough brio to get well-deserved applause. Then again, his subplot, involving an aborted romance with Liz (nicely played by Ashley Perez Flanagan, is a non-starter, as is Arnou's flirtation with Tristan, despite the efforts of Rohan Kymal and John-Michael Lyles. (The gay angle is Blaemire's one major addition to Derek Connelly's original screenplay.) Taylor Trensch's Kenneth has the requisite manic intensity tied to an equally deep vulnerability; you can see why Darius would flip from exploiting to protecting him.

Lee Sunday Evans' direction is brisk without trying to oversell the material and she stages a nifty climax around Kenneth's machine, which looks like a glittery coffee cart. (The scene features a classic illusion by Steve Cuiffo that lends some punch to the finale.) Krit Robinson's spare scenic design features a bandstand plus the occasional scenic piece -- a water tower, the moon, a diner banquette -- with Reza Behjat's inventive lighting filling in the rest. Sarita Fellows has conjured closets of everyday casual outfits that suit the characters perfectly. Drew Levy's sound design is one of the clearest and most intelligible for a rock musical in recent memory.

But this is a wan exercise in generational anxiety that offers few laughs and a set of characters whose problems hardly seem to matter. The show wants to have it both ways regarding Kenneth and his project, leading to an ending that feels tacked on and dishonest. This is basically the indie version of Broadway musicals like Beetlejuice, Mrs. Doubtfire, and Back to the Future, shows that struggle to define themselves against their source material, ending up feeling like rote exercises. Is it too late for a trip back to 2023 and a rewrite? --David Barbour