Laughing on the Links? That's Par for the Course

From The New York Times, November 24, 2003. By Neil Genzlinger.

Gotta love a show that admits right up front that it's lame, superfluous and occasionally offensive, then goes about unabashedly proving that for the next two hours. Such is "Golf: The Musical," a hilarious revue by Michael Roberts that turns mindlessness and predictability into art forms.

Yes, as the opening number, "A Show About Golf," confesses, this really is 18 songs about golf. A boring sport, an elitist sport, a sport that makes men dress funny: all of this is freely admitted, then reveled in. It's so obvious and shameless that you can actually feel yourself getting stupider as you watch. It feels great.

The four-member cast, directed by Christopher Scott, knows all this and plays the crowd and the material beautifully. Trisha Rapier has the first-act highlight with "A Great Lady Golfer," bemoaning the relative anonymity of the women who play the sport. Christopher Sutton delivers a nicely bizarre tour of "The Golfing Museum," and Joel Blum and Sal Viviano show us what Hope and Crosby have been doing now that they're both in the afterlife. (Bing, it turns out, had been waiting a long time for Bob to show up for the heavenly tee-off.)

Can this kind of stuff be sustained for 18 songs (one per hole of a standard round of golf, as you may have guessed)? No. But this show at the John Houseman Theater Center, based on a concept by Eric Krebs, succeeds because the clunkers are well spaced, and after a while their very clunkiness is part of the appeal.

The musical may be slapdash, but it's also perfectly controlled. You find this out late in the game as the show seems to be running out of steam. Only an illusion, it turns out; the best joke has been saved for almost last. Mr. Viviano delivers it in a ballad called "The Beautiful Time," via a sublime bit of bait-and-switch that you'll be savoring long afterward. Maybe you'll also be carrying a door prize because, yes, this hokey show even has an audience-participation moment.