In My Life: A Postmortem Broadway Review

It’s impossible for me to spoil the musical In My Life. It played on Broadway for three months in 2005, never once filling the Music Box theatre to more than 40 percent capacity. Unlike some flopped musicals, like Lestat and Carrie, which managed to garner a cult following despite their short runs, In My Life left no legacy to speak of. You’ll never see it.

Dear reader, it was unhinged.

Written by the infamous Joseph Brooks (known as much for his sexual assault charges and eventual suicide as for his Grammy award winning song, “You Light Up My Life”), In My Life told the story of JT, a young man with Tourette’s Syndrome. It didn’t have a cohesive plot, so much as it had a smorgasbord of bizarre elements, but I’m going to try and sum it up as best I can.

*Cracks knuckles*

Here we go.

So, JT is a radio DJ and an orphan, having lost his mother and his sister in a drunk driving accident. He falls in love with Jenny, a girl who likes to eat Chinese take-out with just her hands. God, who lives in a heaven consisting entirely of filing cabinets, and who spends his days singing advertising jingles for hot dogs and soft drinks, is bored, so he commissions a flamboyantly gay angel named Winston to make JT’s life miserable. Winston, in a comedic number involving pirates and sexy nurses, gives JT a brain tumor. It’s all very sad, but it turns out okay, because JT’s dead little sister finds the drunk driver who killed her, who turns out to be Jenny’s ex-boyfriend. Dead Sister and Dead Drunk Guy reconcile, leaving God so moved that he takes away JT’s brain tumor. The show ends with a giant lemon and torrents of yellow confetti raining down from the sky.

I saw the musical on a cold December day. I’d been wandering New York City with a crumpled twenty dollar bill in my pocket, in search of any show offering student discounts. When I walked into the Music Box to see if they had a seat that I could afford, the guy at the box office laughed and said he’d sell me a ticket if I was sure that was what I really wanted. Outside the theatre, two ushers stood shivering beneath the lemon shaped marque, trying in vain to get people to take free sample CDs of songs from the musical. Written on the back of each CD was a promise that it would contain the best music the listener would ever hear.

Here’s a sample of that music:

https://youtu.be/Xs8F3YFx5gUG

It sounds like a carnival tune with lyrics written by a twelve year old who hasn’t learned the meaning of good taste.

Suffice to say, those CDs might not have been the great advertisement that In My Life’s creative team was hoping they’d be. As I grabbed my free CD, the girl handing them out asked whether or not I’d like extras.

I’m a big Broadway fan. I’ve seen well over 100 performances, ranging from famous failures like Frank Wildhorn’s Dracula, to blockbusters like Hamilton.

I’ve never seen something as surreal as In My Life. The seats around me were nearly empty! I was allowed to sit wherever I wanted, and one of the few other groups of people in the theatre was loudly complaining about how they didn’t want to see the show, but their friend was in it.

From the moment the curtain opened, however, I could feel my heart vibrating. I very much did want to see this show. The fact that something could make so little sense yet still exist on Broadway was a revelation.

There’s something ephemeral about seeing a live performance, and something even more ephemeral about seeing one that’s doomed to fail. Getting to see this show that so few other people would ever see was exciting, because it felt like I was getting a bigger percentage of the performance. If I’d gone to see Wicked, I would have had to share it with a thousand screaming fans, but instead I was nearly alone in a desolate theatre being taken on a bizarre ride.

In My Life, although lacking in spectators, was performed as a Broadway show. The lights were bright. There were flying wires, which were awesome, because actors flying always are. The singers belted. The costumes were glittery. There was an orchestra. The performers and I were breathing the same air. It was cool and shiny. Theatre! Yay!

When the show ended, I went out to the stage door to get autographs. Usually at the stage door, people are jostling and shoving to get a couple of seconds to take a picture with their idols. At this stage door, I was one of three people.

The other two people were a mother, and her son, who had Tourette’s syndrome. They were talking with the lead actor, Christopher J. Hanke, about how well he’d portrayed a character with Tourette’s, and how much it had meant to them. Looking shy, Hanke told them about how he’d put hours of research into the role, and how it’d been important to him to play his character with sensitivity and realism, even if the rest of the plot was based in fantasy and magic. It showed me that even messy shows can contain gems, and can really mean something to people.

I don’t know if it’s fair to call this article a review of In My Life. As I stated at the beginning, the show is gone. Reading this won’t help you make an informed decision on whether or not to see it, because it’s over. That ship has sailed.

What I would like to do is make a case for flops in general. Every piece of live theatre has something good about it, even if the only good thing is that it’s live. What flops offer is a chance to partake in something bright and short-lived, an experience that will only be shared between you and a small number of other theatre goers.

Plus, some of them are super weird.

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If you’d like to read more about my thoughts on musical theatre, check out these articles:

Little Shop Of Horrors: a Lot of Folks Deserve to Die

Lestat the Musical: a Postmortem Broadway Review

A Short Review of Every Broadway Show I’ve Ever Seen