Theatre in Review: The Road to Qatar! (York Theatre Company)

	Sarah Stiles. Photo: Carol Rosegg

The Road to Qatar! has an irresistible comic premise: Two struggling musical theatre writers are hired to create a 90-minute tuner for the opening of a soccer stadium in the title country. (Astonishingly, it's a true story, which happened to Qatar's librettist, Stephen Cole and composer, David Krane.) And, when the lights come up on a chorus of sheiks, singing, in the most alarming manner, "This is a story about musical comedy terrorism" before breaking into a tap combination, you have every reason to expect an evening of bizarre and original amusement.

Sadly, the opening proves to be false advertising. This is a story about very little, as scene after repetitive scene features the two scribes, here named Michael and Jeffrey, trembling with flop sweat while their sinister, sneering employers make ridiculous, impossible demands. (Among other things, they want scenes set in the Stone Age and ancient Greece, plus a sequence featuring Muhammad Ali.) This continues until the show opens and is predictably awful. Blackout. The authors' conceit is that their Middle Eastern adventure constitutes an update of the Hope-Crosby Road pictures, but in fact The Road to Qatar! has no point of view beyond the mad rush to get to the next joke.

And some of those jokes have a provenance dating back to the Dead Sea Scrolls. The heroes constantly refer to themselves as "two short Jews," and, predictably, they complain about gas, back problems, and their families. (Jeffrey, refusing to sign on to the project, says, "I have this sick mother." "Don't we all," cracks Michael.) They worry that their employers will discover they are Jewish and gay, leading one of them to say that they should stick with the policy of "don't ask, don't Tel Aviv." At one point, Jeffrey feels compelled to defend Mansour, their producer, saying, "He may be an incompetent theatrical producer but he's not a killer." "That would make him a Hollywood producer," replies Jeffrey. If that's not enough for you, let me add that, when trying to come up with a title for their epic, one of the candidates is Sari, Wrong Number.

Oddly, the show has little or nothing to say about the pleasures and frustrations of working in an art form as arcane and unforgiving as musical theatre. Even more oddly, it's never clear what this project means to Michael and Jeffrey. As a result, The Road to Qatar! becomes a show about meeting a deadline -- not the most interesting of challenges. Aside from a weirdly irrelevant song called "Oil," most of the numbers tend to restate the situation in song; even the lightest of entertainments needs a touch of emotional engagement, but these numbers are drawn from the same worn joke book as the libretto. One exception is the title song from the show-within-the-show, "Aspire," which has an insanely catchy pop hook that I know I'll get out of my head in only eight or nine weeks. (Interestingly, "Aspire" is taken from the show that Cole and Krane wrote for Qatar.) Near the end, one of the boys notes sentimentally that he now believes "musical comedy really can change the world." Maybe, but not until you get a throughline.

If The Road to Qatar! sometimes amuses, it's because Philip George's direction has a blessedly light touch and plenty of invention. There's a lovely moment when the entire production team -- minus Michael and Jeffrey -- produces clicking pens, ready to shred their script. Bob Richards' choreography livens up even the weakest numbers. When Jeffrey is shipped off to Bratislava to record the score, the chorus is wittily represented by puppets (The spare setting, amusing costumes, and clever puppets are by Michael Bottari and Ronald Case.) Unfortunately, even George allows a gag involving a puppet camel taking a dump on stage.

James Beaman and Keith Gerchak give it their all as Michael and Jeffrey, but even Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick would have trouble with these gag lines. Bill Nolte and Bruce Warren are suitably intimidating as Mansour and his production consultant, Farid, but again, nobody is rising above the material. The one exception is Sarah Stiles, who gets away with murder was Nazirah, the easy-on-the-eyes production assistant and translator; whether extolling the joys of shopping or eyeing Michael as husband material, she plays with a fiendish conviction that earns real laughs.

The rest of the production, including Martin Vreeland's lighting and Chris Kateff's projections, is solid. Nobody can accuse York Theatre of not giving The Road to Qatar! its best shot. But this is one musical entertainment that should have closed out of town -- in Dubai.--David Barbour