"'Disaster!' will provide a rush of giddy nostalgia that’s just as pleasurable, at times, as the more substantial rewards of the musical theater’s higher-reaching shows...'Disaster!' has such a sensational cast that musical lovers incognizant of the guilty pleasures of the movies being lampooned may still have plenty to savor...The first act tends toward waywardness, and while it runs just an hour, it feels longer...But the performances provide sufficient distraction."
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“Put 'The Poseidon Adventure,' 'Earthquake' and 'Airplane!' in a blender; add 30 pop hits from the 1970s; stir in a seasoned cast of Broadway pros...This is the recipe for 'Disaster!', a lovably scrappy and often deliciously silly jukebox-musical spoof…Simard is divinely funny; she’s giving one of the funniest musical-comedy performances I’ve seen in years. Not every joke in 'Disaster!' lands, but there’s a lot to enjoy on this nostalgia trip.”
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“It’s possible to imagine that its charms seemed large in those Off Broadway spaces. They do not in the 1,230-seat Nederlander, where a big and ugly set frames a tiny entertainment that should probably have been left in a basement rec room...The humor is entirely based on this shoehorning technique, which was already long out of fashion in 1979...Only when the nun sings 'Torn Between Two Lovers' does it really pay off, and that’s because of Jennifer Simard’s brilliant underplaying."
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"I doubt the world is full of sixtysomething fans of ‘The Poseidon Adventure’ who long to see what can best be described as an only-the-jokes-have-been-changed knockoff of ‘Airplane!’. As for most everyone else, they’re too young to remember what Seth Rudetsky and Jack Plotnick are spoofing. Nor does it help that ‘Disaster!’ is silly rather than funny, save for the gloriously redemptive presence of Jennifer Simard...I can’t wait to see her in a real show—and I bet it won’t take long."
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"A cast of extraordinarily gifted stars appears to have been tricked into stretching a three-minute parody of movies that were parodies to begin with into a two-hour show. The result is so painfully witless it’s hard to tell where the sea-spray ends and the flop sweat begins...There’s nothing quite like watching a terrific comic actor pace the stage with tiger sharks where his forearms once were and still not being funny. Someone throw these folks a life preserver."
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“This spoof of catastrophe-themed movies set on a floating casino and mixed with ’70s pop hits is not a Titanic — or a jackpot. The campy entertainment lands halfway between. In other words, it’s not 'Hot Stuff', one of the disco ditties sung. It’s Tepid Stuff. It’s not sharp enough to be a toothy parody. Or consistently funny enough to be called hilarious...As is, creators Seth Rudetsky, and Jack Plotnick, who directs, have come up with something see-worthy but middle-of-the-road.”
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"Although not particularly glitzy or glam, this is a good cast that knows the comic ropes — and then some, in the special case of Jennifer Simard…The fun is contagious as long as we’re following these eccentric musical cues for plot and character development…At the helm, Plotnick manages the traffic well enough, and the actors are game, bless their hearts. But ultimately, '70s disaster movies were far more ludicrous than anything on this stage.”
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"This is one of those musical comedies in which everyone tends to stand around inertly as a gag gets played out or a song gets sung. It's also the type of disposable send-up that can play like gangbusters in a scrappy dive theater with tacky sets, but looks cheap and desperate in a big house…That's not to say it's without laughs…Overall, it's dispiriting to watch a gifted cast working above material that seldom amounts to more than hit-or-miss sketch fodder.”
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