The Morning After

People often
underestimate the importance of personality when it comes to theater. Singing
and dancing and acting are all musts, but a show can sometimes sink or swim on
the idiosyncrasies that an actor can bring to his or her role. And in the case
of The York Theatre Company’s Tomorrow
Morning, a quartet of actors who bring an extra sparkle is exactly what’s
needed to make this dull new musical palatable.

For couples
Catherine and Jack, and John and Kat, the titular dawn brings with it two very
different reasons to be nervous. John and Kat (Matthew Hydzik and Autumn
Hurlbert) will be married; after 10 years, Jack and Catherine (D.B. Bonds and
Mary Mossberg) will sign their divorce papers. As the couples sing about their
futures and their pasts, the show never gains a momentum that could propel
audiences past the ridiculous plot and heavy-handed dialogue fast enough to
ignore them. Instead, director Tom Mullen drags out every listless moment,
emphasizing the already obvious ironies inherent in juxtaposing the four.

As the show
limps along (the running time is 75 minutes, but it hardly feels that brief),
questions regarding the relationship between the two couples begin to crop up.
Both Kat and Catherine work at Taschen; choreographer Lorin Latarro adds in
some odd moments when the two men and the two women mirror one another.
Ultimately, we realize that we’re watching the same couple at the beginning and
the ending of their marriage—how else to explain the unflattering hair color
that Mossberg is stuck with, other than that it’s an approximation of
Hurlbert’s?

Written and
composed by Laurence Mark Wythe, the show is too treacly, too earnest to be
treated with the reverence and seriousness that Mullen has imposed on it;
neither Mullen nor Wythe leave any room for humor, despite the presence of a
production number revealing all the characters’ secrets (John collects vintage
porn!). And even in the small theater at The York, the four-piece band often
drowns out the actors—which might be a blessing in disguise, since the songs
here are so generic they feel more suited to a revue. The most inaudible, Bonds
gives such a low-energy performance that he might as well be sleepwalking
through his underwritten role.

Actually, all of
the roles are underwritten. None of the characters are anything other than
concepts: Catherine is the angry, betrayed wife who’s hurting beneath her fits
of rage. Kat is the worried fiancée, especially after she inadvertently
discovers that she’s pregnant. John, meanwhile, smirks and jokes his way
through his frequent phone conversations and meetings with Kat the night before
their wedding, before turning suddenly serious at the prospect of becoming a
father.

Even the
choreography feels like busy work, as if Latarro knew that he needed to add in
some movement but was hampered by the size of the stage and the two couches
that take up most of it. The sincerity-laced duets and solos here don’t really
require accompanying dances, but Latarro gamely throws some at the songs,
reaching a nadir in “The Game Show” by having the actors shuffle two cubes
around in a circle. The heart that beats beneath Tomorrow Morning is in the right place, but that won’t keep you
from wishing the show had some brains to it.

Tomorrow Morning

Through April
23, York Theatre Company, 619 Lexington Ave. (at 54th St.), 212-935-5820;
$67.50.