Head Over Heels opens on Broadway tonight at Broadway's Hudson Theatre (141 West 44th Street)! Let's see what the critics had to say! From the visionaries that rocked Broadway with Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Next To Normal, American Idiot, Spring Awakening and Avenue Q, the Head Over Heels creative team is led by director Michael Mayer with musical supervision, orchestrations and arrangements by Tom Kitt and choreography by Spencer Liff. Head Over Heels was conceived and has an original book by Jeff Whitty and is adapted by James Magruder. Head Over Heels is based upon The Arcadia by Sir Philip Sidney. The creative team also includes scenic by Julian Crouch, costume design by Arianne Phillips, lighting design by Kevin Adams, sound design by Kai Harada and projection design by Andrew Lazarow. Casting by Jim Carnahan Casting. Kimberly Grigsby serves as Musical Director. Lisa Iacucci is Production Stage Manager. In the kingdom of Arcadia, the "beat" is divine. But when an oracle's prophecy of doom threatens its beloved beat, it propels the king and his royal family through a journey of mistaken identities, jealous lovers, secret rendezvouses and sexual awakening - where everything (and everyone) is not what it seems. Head Over Heels features 18 of The Go-Go's iconic hit songs including "We Got the Beat," "Get Up and Go," "Cool Jerk," "Vacation," "Our Lips Are Sealed," "Lust to Love," "Head Over Heels" and Belinda Carlisle's solo hits "Mad About You" and "Heaven is a Place on Earth." Ben Brantley, The New York Times: You would think that a sexually polymorphous musical that combines a Renaissance pastoral romance with the songs of the 1980s California rock group the Go-Go's would at the very least be a hoot, a show that could get sloppy drunk on its own outrageousness. Yet "Head Over Heels," which opened on Thursday night at the Hudson Theater, feels as timid and awkward as the new kid on the first day of school. Greg Evans, Deadline: For better or worse, Broadway's Head Over Heels is stuck with being known as "the Go-Go's musical" - better because of the good will floating on stage with all those lighter-than-air hits by Belinda Carlisle, Jane Wiedlin, et.al., worse because the hard-working new production can't seem to keep itself from popping those effervescence tune bubbles one by one. Kelly Connolly, Entertainment Weekly: Directed by Michael Mayer (Spring Awakening, Hedwig and the Angry Inch), the joyful production dials the camp to 11; this is a show with its tongue planted firmly in its cheek, except when it's in someone else's mouth. Matt Windman, amNY: Um, no. Contrary to the affirmatively cheery chant of its opening number, "Head Over Heels," a new jukebox musical on Broadway in which the hit songs of the all-female 1980s pop-punk band The Go-Go's are inserted into a ridiculous Elizabethan-era pastiche, has not "got the beat." That probably got lost long ago in the development of this oddball property. Adam Feldman, Time Out New York: To enjoy Head Over Heels, which offers quite a lot to enjoy, it is probably best to kick up your heels and put your head on hold. That's not to say that this saucy, boisterous musical doesn't have a brainy side, starting with its ambitious crossbreeding of four time periods: It grafts a 2010s queer sensibility onto songs from the 1980s-by the all-girl pop-punk quintet the Go-Go's (plus two hits from lead singer Belinda Carlisle's solo career)-and fits them into a 16th-century story that is set in ancient Greece. The dialogue, in iambic pentameter liberally sprinkled with thou and thee, contrasts amusingly with the unornamented lyrics of such go-to Go-Go's bops as "Vacation," "Our Lips Are Sealed" and "We Got the Beat." Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune: A lot of harder-edged Go-Go's fans who find their way through the door will wonder what on earth all of these silly theater people are doing with their beloved music, not just because it feels so far removed from its original pioneering context but also because the sensibility here so doubles down on fluttery theatricality at the expense of raw, charged, visceral, feminist pop. Frank Scheck, Hollywood Reporter: If you have trouble imagining songs like "Vacation" and "Cool Jerk" fitting into a scenario depicting a royal family's romantic complications, you still will after seeing this relentlessly frothy musical, for which the term "check your brain at the door" could have been invented. The farcical, gender-fluid shenanigans are as campy as things get on Broadway. And that's saying something. Terry Teachout, The Wall Street Journal: Michael Mayer ("Spring Awakening") has done what he can to put a directorial shine on "Head Over Heels." Spencer Liff's choreography is excitingly volatile and the sets and costumes are expensively fancy, while the five-piece pit band is as hot as a runaway atomic pile. Bonnie Milligan, a delightful performer with pipes to die for who previously appeared in the 2015 production, nails best-in-show honors as the horrifically vain Princess Pamela, who searches in vain for a suitable swain, then belatedly figures out that she's a lesbian (GASP!). Everyone else in the cast takes care of business, and if you really, really like the Go-Go's, you might possibly find the results tolerable. I doubt there are still enough Go-Go's fans out there to make "Head Over Heels" a hit, but stranger things have happened on Broadway. Roma Torre, NY1: The convoluted story revolves around a king and queen, their two daughters and a shepherd love interest. Their lives do indeed turn head over heels as King Bacilius visits the Oracle Pythio who portends a series of calamitous events. It gets awfully complicated and audiences may tune out before it's all resolved. But I'm not even sure it matters because if you're willing to suspend your disbelief, under Michael Mayer's spirited direction, there's so much good-natured talent on the stage you may just give in to the frivolity. David Cote, Village Voice: Head Over Heels does go retro, but waaay retro, to achieve something rarer and wonderfully strange. They've found the Venn overlap among "We Got the Beat," LGBTQ awakening, and Elizabethan allegory on humane statecraft. Marilyn Stasio, Variety: It's really hard to laugh when somebody's holding a gun to your head. That's the way this Go-Go's feels in "Head Over Heels," an over-written, over-designed, and generally overdone production directed by Michael Mayer. From the sets and costumes to the performance style, the basic principle seems to be: Less is boring and more is never enough. Thanks, no doubt, to the Oracle of Delphi (played here by the impishly funny Peppermint), it's a miracle that at least some of the wit in Jeff Whitty's original book gets through. Johnny Oleksinski, The New York Post: The new musical "Head Over Heels," which opened Thursday on Broadway, takes the songs of '80s American girl group the Go-Go's, plops them in a British story from the 16th century and adds a bunch of modern, self-referential jokes. It's an idea that's so crazy, it just might work! It doesn't. This indulgent show is wackier than it is fun, and elicits more "huh?" than "ha". Worse, it treats the catchy pop music like a side of spinach. Steven Suskin, New York Stage Review: There are surprises galore on the stage of the Hudson Theatre, where Head Over Heels has landed following two West Coast tryouts. Surprises in tone: The source material is an Elizabethan comedy by one of the Bard's lesser contemporaries, set to songs by an all-female 1980s rock group called The Go-Go's. Surprises in gender, which are pretty much the point of the evening. Surprises in production, with director Michael Mayer and his team altogether littering the stage with jokes and gags and gimmicks which grow, like a snowball, until just about everything gets a laugh. The most surprising thing, perhaps, is that after all is said and done, this purposely low-brow, far-from-subtle propaganda statement for sexual equality turns out to be a wittily wicked romp. Melissa Rose Bernardo, New York Stage Review: Here's the sad truth: If you've been walking around the house humming "Heaven Is a Place on Earth," it's probably because you heard it on a Progressive insurance commercial. Even I, a card-carrying Belinda Carlisle fan (and someone who has performed that song more than once at karaoke), will admit that her oeuvre-meaning, of course, the music of her '80s all-female pop-punk band the Go-Go's-wasn't exactly ripe for the Broadway treatment. Sara Holdren, Vulture: But the universe of Head Over Heels is a forgiving one, a world where love of all stripes truly does conquer all, and despite doing some real violence before the play is through, Basilius is shown mercy. "Under my supervision," says Gynecia to her chastened husband, "I predict a gentler man will over time evolve." She's not just talking about Basilius: In Head Over Heels, the future isn't female per se, but it's definitely not male either. Where gender, love, and governance are concerned, the future is free - free of the old definitions, the old order, the old beat. The straight and narrow path is a big fat dead end, and if the arc of the moral universe does indeed bend toward justice, Head Over Heels joyously insists that it keep bending.<doc-sep>This review has drawn significant feedback. It has since been edited. Read our response here. You would think that a sexually polymorphous musical that combines a Renaissance pastoral romance with the songs of the 1980s California rock group the Go-Go’s would at the very least be a hoot, a show that could get sloppy drunk on its own outrageousness. Yet “Head Over Heels,” which opened on Thursday night at the Hudson Theater, feels as timid and awkward as the new kid on the first day of school. Make that the new kid who longs to run with the wild crowd but can’t quite commit to being as bad as coolness demands. Directed by Michael Mayer, who has been more than competent at the helm of Broadway rock musicals like “American Idiot” and “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” “Head Over Heels” lacks the courage of its contradictions. It mutters deferentially when what you want is a rebel yell. Paradox is at the heart of this production, which was conceived and originally written by Jeff Whitty (“Avenue Q”), then adapted by James Magruder (best known for his stage versions of literary classics). It was Mr. Whitty who had the idea of reimagining Philip Sidney’s “The Arcadia,” a 16th-century fantasy of trouble in paradise, as a picturesque frame for the pop hits of the Go-Go’s. That all-female band, as you may know (and if you don’t, you are not this production’s target audience), rode its rough-edged combination of punk riotousness and surfer-girl sunniness to the top of the pop charts in the early 1980s. Though many of their hits ponder the vagaries of love, they otherwise have little in common with an arcane literary universe that is usually the province of graduate students.<doc-sep>
For better or worse, Broadway’s Head Over Heels is stuck with being known as “the Go-Go’s musical” – better because of the good will floating on stage with all those lighter-than-air hits by Belinda Carlisle, Jane Wiedlin, et.al., worse because the hard-working new production can’t seem to keep itself from popping those effervescence tune bubbles one by one. With the Go-Go’s music shotgun-wedded to Sir Philip Sidney’s 16th century prose poem The Arcadia – a marriage conceived by Avenue Q‘s Jeff Whitty, who wrote the original book before splitting, reportedly in part over his inclination to rewrite some of the Go-Go’s lyrics – Head Over Heels is Elizabethan farce by way of ye olde MTV. The verse may be archaic, but the we’re here sentiment is as up to date as last week’s episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Further adapted by James Magruder (Triumph of Love) and directed by Michael Mayer (Spring Awakening), Head Over Heels uses lots of the rib-poking, anachronistic jokes and drag-queen ribaldry that, once upon a Ridiculous Theatrical Company time when Charles Ludlam ruled the land, seemed both revolutionary and dangerous. Now, when either the material seems tamed for a general audience – or the general audience seems untamed enough for the material – Head Over Heels just strikes as winking and self-satisfied, occasionally amusing, occasionally cloying. The plot, lest you expect an odd Go-Go to bounce on stage: Set in the old kingdom of Arcadia, the townfolk are kept happy by something called “The Beat.” I say “something” because, while perhaps earlier script drafts explained the device, here, it’s mentioned and then more or less forgotten. The kingdom, campily depicted through painted, intentionally artificial flats, and where everyone speaks in verse and generally lives by way of Shakespearean tropes, is ruled by the privileged, mansplaining King Basilius (Jeremy Kushnier) and his deeply unfulfilled (in many ways) wife Gynecia (a wonderful Rachel York). The royal daughters have the usual love dramas, if by usual we mean the younger Philoclea (Alexandra Socha) is besmitten with low-stationed, good-hearted shepherd Musidorus (Andrew Durand) and the vain elder Pamela (Bonnie Milligan) rejects one buff suitor after another, each young swain lacking a certain something – a something Pamela’s female attendant Mopsa (Taylor Iman Jones) seems to have in spades. Farcical complications are set in cross-dressing motion when the shepherd disguises himself as an Amazon, bringing out the lustful urges in, well, just about everyone, regardless of station or gender. The usual hijinks and mistaken pairings ensue, along with the expected voguing and ’80s-influenced dancing. But the main complication arrives via Pythio, the Oracle of Delphi, played, in fact, by Peppermint, a former contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race. Early in the goings on, Pythio foretells King Basilius and his lost-on-the-way-to-the-Forum viceroy Dametas (Tom Alan Robbins) about some bad mojo heading for Arcadia, punishment, it seems, for all the duplicity and intolerance going on. Even before Peppermint’s Pythio intones “Thou better workest” – a groaner that seems more dated than all the Elizabethan versifying – Head Over Heels is on its way to upending patriarchy, homophobia, sexism, intolerance and subtlety. For a show that is so determined to transcend convention – or, as Peppermint is directed to deliver the word early on, “traaaaaaannnnnssssend” – Head Over Heels feels predicable from start to finish. Even Peppermint, whom the production credits with being Broadway’s first transgender woman to create a principal role, provides little here that hasn’t been tested in Kinky Boots and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, a familiar role that’s coming awfully close to some sort of flamboyant diva equivalent of Spike Lee’s “Magical Negro.” Head Over Heels offers up a few surprises. Bonnie Milligan’s eldest princess Pamela plays on our notions of conventional beauty, confident and convincing in her plus-size appeal even though the supposedly “plain” younger sister hews closer to Broadway’s notion of the classic ingenue. But the biggest surprise is an unfortunate one: The Go-Go’s songs, which must certainly must have provided the initial attraction for a production team that, over the show’s four-years-plus of development has been joined by Gwyneth Paltrow, Donovan Leitch and a kingdom-load of others, don’t hold up all that well. At least not in musical theater form. From the title tune to group best “Our Lips are Sealed,” the lovely, buoyant, throw-away pop confections get blanded-out into show tune mediocrity.