, “The ending is happy if you are Christian enough to believe that getting to heaven is worth it even if it took a gunfight to get there, while dragging your blameless wife along.” “Were this only a play,” the man from New York asserted, “no one would produce it now . . . . As drama, it is so mild that cringeworthiness may be its strongest trait.” It’s not a play, however, Green continued, “it’s a musical.” “The score is flat-out lovely,” with “a clutch of” tunes with Duke’s “adventurous jazz harmonies.” But the New York review-writer still isn’t fully satisfied: “And yet a show so problematic cannot ever be totally satisfying.” He faulted Santiago-Hudson’s “very flat and visually cluttered” staging, which Green found “emotionally withdrawn as if slightly embarrassed.” He had, however, words of high praise for both Hughes as Georgia Brown and Camille Brown’s choreography.
The cyber press paralleled the print outlets. On Theater Pizzazz, Brian Scott Lipton, warning that Cabin in the Sky is “the kind of early musical theater piece that, in less seasoned hands, could easily have come off as unpleasantly dated and too folksy by half,” but, “thanks to” a sterling creative and performing ensemble, “the result is delightful.” This, despite the fact that “Lynn Root’s book is a bit silly and old-fashioned, and the characters are mostly two-dimensional” and “the show is written so lightly that the actual outcomes hardly matter.” Still, said Lipton, “The score . . . does matter.” After lauding the sets, costumes, and choreography, TP’s reviewer concluded, “Indeed, this is one ‘Cabin’ you’ll leave grudgingly, albeit with a smile on your face.” On TheaterMania, Zachary Stewart described the Encores! production “lovingly re-created”: though the “characters are a little too cute for their own good,” Santiago-Hudson and co-adapter Viertel “keep the tone buoyant and airy, highlighting the craftsmanship of the score while acknowledging the ridiculousness of the book. Nothing is too serious and everything is fair game for a laugh.” He added, “Really, the wisp of a book is just an excuse for the song and dance.” Though Stewart gave kudos to many of the performers, he declared, “LaChanze delivers the evening's only completely sincere performance. . . . It’s only through her performance that the serious themes of life and death ever come to the fore in this mostly lighthearted romp.” The TM writer found this satisfactory, since, he offered, “We don’t go to Encores! for gut-wrenching drama; we go to hear beautiful old Broadway scores brought back to life with a full onstage orchestra, and that’s exactly what we get here.”
Matthew Murray of Talkin’ Broadway, averring of Cabin “that what’s truly on the table is the African-American spirit, and a unique culture that, in the pre-Civil Rights era, was particularly dashing, distinct, and dangerous,” adjudged that at City Center, “what should be searing is instead a snooze.” Murray confirmed, “There’s no single point of failure, no one culprit at whom all the fingers should be pointed,” even acknowledging that under Santiago-Hudson’s direction, the production “is hardly poorly executed,” praising the “fanciful sets . . . and costumes” and “playful lighting.” He went on to laud the actors, the score, and the musical performance, “But,” he laments, “there’s a shimmering, shivering ‘So what?’ quality about the proceedings that none of these 24-karat components can overcome.” The TB blogger diagnosed “a listlessness at work that keeps sparks from igniting into flames” and asserted that “there’s little meat or spice to the” main plot line so that “it’s tough to rustle up desire to follow it to the end.” Murray found Camille Brown’s dances “workmanlike and lacking in energy” and the actors “technically proficient but a bit short on house-flooding charisma.” He concluded, given what was to come of musical theater post-Oklahoma!, that “Cabin in the Sky just doesn’t feel connected at all.” BroadwayWorld’s Michael Dale declared, “Cabin in the Sky, though mildly dramatic, is more of a showcase for its stars tha