Sunday, May 4, last day

The PG group left in the morning, and it may not shock you to hear I slept in and missed saying goodbye -- forgivable, perhaps, because I knew they were in good hands with Paul and Jackie. I think most would agree it was a good trip, with variety in the shows we saw and some appealing extras. As a bonus, we pretty much dodged the rain that irregularly threatened daily, throughout the trip.

Country Laine Mazza, Broadway gypsy and swing in "Cry-Baby," takes care of the autograph hounds.

Then I dove into more writing -- on this journal, mainly, but also the upcoming Weekend cover on Anthony Chisholm, featured actor of four of August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle plays in New York and now about to do "Two Trains Running" in Pittsburgh.

Just in time I cleared out of my room, checked my bags and sprinted down the block to the Marriott Marquis Theatre to see "Cry-Baby." Like "Hairspray" (with which it shares key creators), it's a musical comedy stage adaptation of a John Waters film about rebellious youth in mid-century Baltimore. The reviews were pretty dismissive -- not that I read the reviews when I'm soon going to review that show myself, but you hear about them anyway -- which as usual predisposed me to find the reviews wrong, as I did for a while.

In plot, "Cry-Baby" is really more like "Grease," with its good-girl-attracted-to-renegade (and of course renegade-attracted-to-good-girl -- ain't Nature grand?). Enough off the off-the-wall, subversive Waters spirit seeps through to keep it surprising for a while, but gradually it turns predictable, and along the way you realize that most of the characters are pretty cardboard and aren't going to deepen or develop.

Courtney Mazza, lovely as ever.

It has sprightly early rock 'n' roll music, however. I'm a sucker for that sweet, bouncy sound from my youth.

There, that's a thumbnail review. I wonder if I'll find more to say when I come to write a review proper?

It's pretty rare to go to a Broadway musical without finding Pittsburghers in the cast, and "Cry-Baby" is no exception. To start, the bouncy, parodic choreography is by Point Park's Tony-winning Rob Ashford. In the featured quartet of straight, white-bread guys who are the villains of the piece, there's Peter Matthew Smith, a Quaker Valley and Point Park grad, also familiar from Pittsburgh Musical Theater. And cast as an invaluable swing is one of my favorite Pittsburgh talents, Courtney Laine Mazza, whom I recall seeing win a Kelly Award as a CAPA freshman (I think it was).

(Click here for a 2000 interview with Courtney and Sarrah Strimel, when both were 18-year-olds in the CLO ensemble.)

She performed that day, so I waited patiently at the stage door amid the autograph hounds with their armloads of posters and programs, to chat for a while. She said it was the fourth "track" she's done already -- a reminder that understudying is on the whole harder work than starring, since you need to know so many different parts and you find yourself dancing with yourself, as it were, playing a role that interacts with a role you just played. Talk about your out-of-body-experiences!

"Nobdy knows how hard it is to swing," she said. But she's also assistant dance captain, so although she has many more years of prime performing time ahead of her, maybe she'll also move into a creative role, as such Pittsburghers as Rob and Kathleen Marshall, Jeff Calhoun and Rob Ashford have done before her.

And now back to Pittsburgh to digest all this and continue writing reviews.

If you're interested in the Post-Gazette theater trips, whether to Broadway, London or the Canadian festivals, check out the advance schedule you can find by scrolling down the right column at www.post-gazette.com/theater. You can also call Gulliver's Travels, 412-441-3131, and ask to be put on the mailing list for those trip announcements that interest you.