A new play by Arthur Laurents will debut in New Jersey next spring.

Laurents, who wrote the books for Gypsy and West Side Story and directs the current production of Gypsy on Broadway, turns either 90 or 91 years old today, depending on your source.

I’ve been thinking lately about getting back into playwriting. This makes me feel like maybe it’s not too late for me after all.

Reviews of Broadway flops, part 1.

“Wild and Wonderful,” The New York Times, December 8, 1971. Reviewed by Clive Barnes.

The new Broadway musical, “Wild and Wonderful,” is wet, windy and wretched. It opened last night at the Lyceum Theater. I shall always try to remember it, and to use it as a yardstick to measure the future.

I don’t want to be gratuitously unkind to the people who perpetrated this — but why did they have the arrogance to imagine that their garrulous wanderings justified two hours of my time, or anyone else’s time? This is a show that insults the intelligence. Producers — even amateur producers — shouldn’t do this. This is the kind of show that sends you back to television — or, if that is too radical, at least back to television commercials.

It is impossible to imagine the precise degree of cultural shock that a show of this type can administer. A musical like this makes critics wonder whether they should ask their publishers for hazardous duty pay for their brains, or, failing that, a precise statement of where they stand with Blue Cross and Blue Shield.

“Wild and Wonderful” is described as a “Big City” fable. Its hero is a West Point dropout who has joined the Central Intelligence Agency. He is assigned to infiltrate youthful radicalism. A girl throws her school books off the George Washington Bridge — it happens every Tuesday, I guess — and he confuses her with a radical bomb-thrower. His C.I.A. chief, who lives in a helicopter, encourages him in this mistake.

The agent radicalizes the girl and takes her to a Roman Catholic shelter. The shelter is managed by Brother John — who wears a turtle-neck and is absolutely groovy — and Father Desmond, who appears to have ulcers and a problem of incipient alcoholism. He also — quite frankly — cannot understand the now generation, or even the youth sub-drug culture. Father Desmond is without it.

The girl — a nice enough kid in all conscience — falls in love, without knowing it, of course, with this young, hippy C.I.A. agent, who happens to be the son of a multimillionaire. But I shall not detain you with the story. The humor — at the performance I saw, people were giggling at the show incontinently but with reason — is so flat that is makes Amsterdam appear like a village at the top of Mount Everest. Indeed, this musical provides a new dimension to flatness.

The music was bad, the lyrics were bad, the book was worse than bad, the choreography unsupportable, the costumes proved singularly hideous and were spectacularly unflattering to every woman in the cast and, in the context, the settings seemed gratefully close to what we think of as professional.

The role of the heroine — who had to carry the most stupid of cumulative gags about late, late show movies — was played with more charm than it deserved by Laura McDuffie, and Walter Willison threw in everything but his kitchen sink, range and refrigerator — to say little or nothing of the air-conditioning — in an effort to make the hero viable. Even Mr. Willison failed, and Mr. Willison is unusually talented. Ted Thurston, who played the priest with something of the gallant air of man about to be defrocked, is also a fine performer who deserves better of life than this.

This was a terrible and witless show. The kind of show where you leave, find that it is raining, instantly feel like Gene Kelly and start singing. At least you are in the street rather than in the theater.

It closed after one performance.

Post number five on [title of show].

I’m sorry. But I can’t get it out of my head. And I’ll explain why.

And then I have an anecdote. But first the explanation.

It’s not like this a flawless, OMFG-amazing this-is-the-best-thing-you’ll-ever-see show. It’s not tightly plotted, and it can be too insider-y, and some of the writing could be more polished, and the second half has problems, and the whole thing has minimal production values.

But there are so many wonderful stretches, and hilarious moments, and brilliant lyrics, and catchy or moving melodies, and the sum of its parts is terrific. And that whole experience on Saturday night — being in that wild, fan-filled audience, going to the stagedoor afterward — the whole thing somehow reconnected me with my much-younger, long-forgotten self.

I haven’t felt this way since I experienced Rent.

My Rent experience started way before I actually saw the show. In the mid-90s, I wasn’t too plugged into the Broadway scene, because I was away from home, at school in Virginia. Rent opened on Broadway in the spring of 1996 (after a long journey), but it wasn’t on my radar. It wasn’t until the end of ’96 that I was home in New Jersey, on break from my first year of law school, that someone mentioned the cast album of the show and how good it was. A few months later I decided to buy the album, knowing nothing about the show and never having heard the music before. I think I bought it over spring break — again while home in New Jersey. I listened to it in my car on the long ride back to Virginia, and it blew me away. For months thereafter, I listened to it endlessly. It was practically the only thing I listened to in my car. To this day I probably know every note of that album.

Then I read online about how this whole subculture had built up around the Rent line. Rent used to have a policy where the first two rows of seats were reserved for the first few dozen people on line outside the theater. Young Rent fanatics would wait outside the Nederlander Theater overnight for tickets, and over time, they developed friendships. Theyd wait all day, then tickets would be distributed at 6 p.m., and you could go grab a bit or whatever until the show at 8.

I read about these people and I was so envious. They seemed like they had so much fun. I wanted to be part of them. I wanted to be in their group.

I suppose it came from my not rebelling enough as a kid, from being too careful and studious — from feeling that while other kids were always allowed to play and break the rules, I, for some reason unknown to my kid self, never was allowed. I carried a Unique Burden. I had a Responsibility. I liked the neatness of my world — do well in school, and in return receive praise and protection from parents and teachers. I preferred my own world, where I knew what the rules were and knew how to follow them and thereby succeed.

Anyway, now I was 23 and I read about the RENT-heads and I wanted to be with them.

That summer, I was home working in New Jersey, and I finally decided to wait on The Line and see the show. There were numerous times I thought about it, and finally one day in the middle of July I decided to skip work and do it. I didn’t want to wait all night long, though, so I decided I’d get up really early and get to the theater by 7 in the morning. If the spots were all filled, then at least I’d tried.

I got there and I was in luck: there were still spots remaining. I hung out in front of the Nederlander with these other people all day. I talked with a few of them, but I didn’t particularly bond with any of them, and I never saw any of them again.

The big downer was that, as I learned sometime during the day, both Anthony Rapp and Adam Pascal were going to be out that night. I’d fallen in love with Anthony Rapp through listening to the cast album, and I was devastated that I wasn’t going to be able to see him perform. And on top of that, Roger was out, too? Both male leads were out? (Turned out Rent experienced a rash of understudies that summer.)

It wound up not mattering. I got a second row ticket and I had a magical experience that night. I was moved to tears more than once, overwhelmed by finally being able to see this show that I’d come to know so well in my own way and to commune with the performers who stood just a few feet in front me.

Anyway. Back to [title of show].

Experiencing it among the fanatics the other night was a much different experience from seeing it at the three-quarters-filled Vineyard Theater a couple of years ago. The combination of the show itself, its inspirational message, the appeal of the four leads, and being among all these fanatics — it all added up to something hard to define.

Afterwards, Matt and I decided to hang out by the stage door for a while. We did this more out of curiosity than out of… what? Well, when I was younger, I might have wanted desperately to commune with the actors, get their autographs, talk to them, and hope that they’d see something great inside me and want to be my friend and that, by some form of osmosis, they might transfer their coolness to me.

But on Saturday night I was 34 years old and I knew that that’s not what happens, and anyway, there were tons of people waiting by the stage door, including a 16-year-old girl who was waiting to give the actors a stuffed toy monkey in a Playbill t-shirt (this relates to the show), and I heard some guy mention how he’d seen Wicked with the original cast, back when he was in second grade. I felt way too old to be there, not cool enough to stand out from the crowd enough for Hunter and Jeff to notice me, and on top of that, I knew that the sort of magic I used to yearn for doesn’t happen. Other people can’t make you different from who you are. There’s no transitive property of coolness.

And we were tired of waiting. So we went home.

So here’s my anecdote.

One weeknight a couple of years ago, I was coming out of the West 4th Street subway station on the way home from somewhere. By the time I got off the last car of the train and walked all the way down the platform to the front end where my stairway was, there was nobody else around.

And then I saw two people coming down those stairs. They were Jeff Bowen and Hunter Bell, the stars and creators of [title of show].

There was nobody else around but me and them.

I was starstruck. But I didn’t say anything, because I was a New Yorker, and we see recognizable people all the time, and you’re not supposed to disturb them, and maybe they were in a hurry to get somewhere, and besides, what would I have said to them?

But I wish I’d said something anyway.

Deep down — sometimes not so deep — I still want to be one of the cool people. The ones who sing and dance and act stupid and hug each other and say funny things to each other and know that they’ll always have each other.

I really want to. Desperately.

Here’s a Q&A about why ushers at many Broadway shows now scan the bar codes on your tickets instead of tearing them. Tidbit:

[T]he scanners record exactly when each patron enters the theatre, allowing Telecharge to amass and analyze data on when people tend to show up. What have they found so far? A lot of the data has confirmed conventional wisdom. For instance, at plays, which tend to attract native New Yorkers, lots of people show up five minutes before curtain. At musicals, which attract more tourists, people tend to show up earlier.

We just got back from the first Broadway preview of [title of show]. It was a night at the theater I’ll never forget.

[title of show] is a musical about its own creation. It was written for the New York Musical Theatre Festival in 2004, transferred to an Off-Broadway run at the Vineyard Theater, and led to a series of YouTube videos about the gang’s quest to get their show on Broadway. (More here.) It’s developed a big cult following among the theater geek set. We first saw it at the Vineyard a couple of years ago, we’d both watched all their videos, and we’ve listened to the cast album a lot, so a few weeks ago we decided to get some tickets for the first preview.

I have never heard cheering in a Broadway theater as loud as I heard in the Lyceum tonight. It was overwhelming. The audience was clearly filled with fans. From beginning to end, the audience screamed and shouting and clapped its heart out for the five people up there. It was a wall of sound.

I felt bad for the elderly couple sitting next to me. They seemed thoroughly baffled. I was next to the husband, who was using the theater’s hearing equipment. At the very beginning, when Larry Pressgrove, the music director, who is actually part of the show, walked out onto the stage, and the audience erupted in cheers, the man leaned over to me and asked who the guy and why everyone was cheering for him.

For the rest of the audience, it was lots of fun. And since the show is about trying to get to Broadway, and this was the first preview on Broadway, it was poignant. The audience spontaneously broke into a standing ovation at the end of the second-to-last song, and it must have lasted a good minute and a half. Who knows what the four principals, Jeff, Hunter, Susan, and Heidi, thought of this. Their expressions were frozen on their faces as they waited for the ovation to die down, but they must have been overwhelmed. During the final number, which is a low-key, poignant piece, a couple of their voices broke as they sang, and Susan’s eyes were filled with tears.

I don’t know how run-of-the-mill Broadway audiences will respond to it. They certainly won’t respond like the audience did tonight. That’s why it was so much fun to be there tonight.

There are a few kinks they need to work out with some of the new material. But the show remains clever and witty and endearing, and it’s filled with inside theater jokes. If you’re a theater geek — or any sort of creative type, for that matter — you’ll appreciate the show and its message.