Red Sox...the musical???

There are times I read the reviews of various movie-made-musical plays in the Broadway Review, but when I saw this I just had to ask myself... ARE YOU SERIOUS??  I know the Sox comeback was awesome.  Amazing.  The most sleepless and exciting sports week of my life.  An event that brought an entire population of Yankee-hating down-and-out fans "we always lose" together for an all out, brawling, long-haired, idiot-fest that we still talk about 6 years later.  But a musical??  That just seems...I dunno.  Silly.

From the New York Times (insert irony here) Theatre Review:

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Babe Ruth shows up to throw a bit of grit into the polished blandness of “Johnny Baseball,” a well-mannered musical about a rudeness-provoking sport, now at the American Repertory Theater here. Of course any show about the curse of the Boston Red Sox would have to include George Herman Ruth Jr., who, according to baseball mythology, was the curse’s cause. After they sold him to the Yankees, in 1920, the Sox didn’t win a World Series for more than eight decades.

Though it deals with the ugly subject of racial discrimination in professional sports of the early 20th century, “Johnny Baseball” mostly stays pretty. A melodious blend of fact and fairy tale, the show centers on Johnny O’Brien (Colin Donnell), a convent-orphanage-bred lad from Worcester, Mass., with a strong pitching arm and a weak grasp on the social facts of life.

Johnny, who is recruited by the Sox during Ruth’s last year with the team, is a wide-eyed kid, exactly as old as the century, who makes the mistake of falling in love with the comely African-American singer (and fellow virgin) Daisy Wyatt (Stephanie Umoh). Though she performs in a brothel, Daisy is almost as innocent as her boyfriend, and as a couple, they make mistakes like kissing in public places. This means that Johnny’s reign at the top of his profession will be cut tragically short.

Its inadvertent, but most persuasive, lesson turns out to be that bad guys — or at least naughty ones — are more fun than good guys. The show’s liveliest scenes, aside from a peppy and jazzy duet between Tim and an untested young player named Willie Mays (Alan H. Green), involve villainous management types, including the Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey (Jeff Brooks), who announces that he loves, vodka, America and “pretty young girls who are confused by life.”