Interludes

VIEWPOINTS – From the tastefully refined to the hilariously crass: Assessing the new commercial Off-Broadway musicals REUNIONS and VAPE!

• By drediman
• December 3, 2025
• No Comments

Currently on the boards of this busy fall theater season, you’ll find a pair of new musicals taking a shot at commercial success Off-Broadway. As always, read on below for my assessments of these stylistically divergent works.

REUNIONS
New York City Center
Through December 14

First up is Reunions (RECOMMENDED), a new musical by Jeffrey Scharf (book and lyrics) and Jimmy Calire (music) which has taken up a lengthy fall residence at New York City Center. In short, the musical adapts and combines two pre-existing one-act plays that share a common narrative occurrence — the coincidental meeting of ex-lovers after much time apart — and dramatically pursues the emotional ripples that follow each instance. The first of the two one-act musicals is the Edwardian England-set The Twelve Pound Look, which is based on a short play by J.M. Barrie (of Peter Pan fame) depicting the unexpected Pygmalion-like encounter between former spouses who never saw eye-to-eye. The second is A Sunny Morning, a charming piece about autumnal love set in a park in Madrid that’s based on a Spanish play by the Quintero Brothers. Collectively, Reunions — which is performed straight through sans intermission — is charming and refreshingly old-fashioned, featuring a solid and perfectly pleasant book and score. Although the songs and dialogue take us to predictable emotional and intellectual places, they’re invariably well-crafted and nicely integrated into the fabric of the two stories. The production — lovingly directed by Gabriel Barre, who makes elegant use of a turntable — brings together an uncommonly accomplished cast, featuring the likes of Chip Zien, Chilean Kennedy, Courtney Reed, and Bryan Fenkart (all of whom have led big Broadway shows), bringing appealing intimacy to their performances. In a welcome change of pace, the musical doesn’t hit the audience over the head with an overly pronounced agenda. Its overarching encouragement to appreciate the simple joys of life is potent enough on its own.

VAPE! THE GREASE PARODY
Theater 555
Through January 4

As subdued and tastefully construed as Reunions is, the opposite is true of Catie Hogan’s Vape! The Grease Parody (RECOMMENDED) currently running at Theater 555. The new musical continues in a long line of musical parodies that almost seem to be a dime a dozen these days (you can read my reviews of recent examples of the increasingly popular musical theater sub-genre here). That being said, Vape! is a decidedly different beast from other spoofs in that it parodies an actual musical, in fact following Grease‘s plot fairly closely — Hogan takes Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey’s iconic songs, overlaying them with even more outrageous lyrics (Grease isn’t known for being a subtle show and is often performed to the hilt to begin with) — with a few notable exceptions (no spoilers here, but the allusions to the 1980s films Xanadu and Splash strike comic gold). Indeed, the show is a step up from your typical musical parody, bringing a hilarious crassness and a new dimension to the universe that it’s spoofing rather than simply leveraging well-known property for knowing, self-referential laughs. In this regard, Vape! has more in common with Seth Rudetsky’s inspired Disaster!, which actually made it all the way to Broadway — albeit for only a short-lived run. This parody version also conjures, perhaps unintentionally, the unsanitized naughtiness and R-rated ethos of the original iteration of Grease when it was first put on in the Chicagoland area, far from the bright lights of the New York theater scene. Despite its scrappy, low budget production values, the overly broad, often unhinged performances by the young cast — some admittedly better singers than others — ensure that the giddy zaniness of it all lands fast and furiously.