'Holiday Inn' Times Two

I had a peculiar experience recently.  I watched a WNET/Channel 13 rebroadcast of the stage adaptation of Irving Berlin’s film musical Holiday Inn with a new book by Gordon Greenberg (b. 1969; revisions of Stephen Schwartz and Nina Faso’s Working and Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris) and Chad Hodge (b. 1977; The Darkest Minds [film], Runaway and Good Behavior [both TV series]) as a matrix for the score by Berlin (1888-1989).  It aired on the Public Broadcasting System’s Great Performances on Friday evening, 30 November, and then about a week later, Turner Classic Movies aired the original 1942 Bing Crosby-Fred Astaire film on Saturday evening, 8 December.  I didn’t think all that much of the Roundabout Theatre Company’s stage adaptation and I thought I saw why while I was watching, but seeing the movie so soon afterwards confirmed it for me.  (By the way, the TCM host,  Ben Mankiewicz, said that Berlin first intended Holiday Inn to be a stage show, but he couldn’t find a producer.  IMDb noted the same thing.)

For the record, the film of Holiday Inn was directed by Mark Sandrich (1900-45; The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat), who also produced the movie, for Paramount Pictures.  The screenplay was written by Claude Binyon (1995-78) from an adaptation by playwright Elmer Rice (1892-1967; The Adding Machine, Street Scene [both stage plays]) from Berlin’s original idea.  The motion picture was filmed in black and white (even though popular and successful color films had been produced since 1939: Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz); the spin-off, White Christmas, was filmed in Technicolor in 1954.  (Computer-colored versions of Holiday Inn are available, but TCM doesn’t air edited or altered films.)   The film, which runs one hour and 40 minutes, was released on 4 August 1942. 

Holiday Inn was number eight on the 1942 list of top-grossing films.  Berlin was nominated for the 1943 Academy Award for Best Writing, Original Story, and musical director Robert Emmett Dolan was nominated for the Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture Oscar.  Berlin won the Best Music, Original Song award for “White Christmas.”  (No one, including Berlin, thought very highly of “White Christmas,” but it became the number one-selling song ever recorded until 1997—55 years—when Elton John’s revised version of “Candle in the Wind” for Princess Diana’s death overtook it.  “White Christmas” is still number two.)

The Greenberg-Hodge Holiday Inn stage adaptation began at the 200-seat Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Connecticut, in 2014 with co-librettist Greenberg directing (Guys And Dolls in West End, Working in Chicago and Off-Broadway).  In 2015, still under Greenberg’s direction, the play opened with a substantially new cast at the St. Louis Municipal Opera Theatre (The Muny), an outdoor amphitheater that seats 11,000 patrons.  Roundabout staged the Broadway début of Holiday Inn at Studio 54 (capacity, about 1006), the former Theatre District night club, opening the production with the cast that appeared in the Great Performances broadcast on 6 October 2016; it ran for 117 regular performances and 38 previews, closing on 15 January 2017.  Greenberg directed once more, and Dennis Jones, the choreographer, was nominated for both the 2017 Tony and Drama Desk Awards.  (The movie was filmed in 1941 and 1942, so it’s safe to assume that it’s set in and around those years, right when the U.S. was entering World War II; the Pearl Harbor attack occurred during the filming.  The play is set in 1946, the year after the war ended.)  The live stage performance of Holiday Inn ran two hours and 15 minutes with an intermission (which was cut for the TV broadcast, which consequently ran two hours).

Roundabout live-streamed the performance of 14 January 2017 on BroadwayHD.com and it was recorded.  PBS originally aired the performance on Great Performances on 25 November 2017 in New York City.  The television production was directed for the cameras by David Horn. 

The movie is notoriously slim on plot.  It’s really an excuse—a pretty good one, to be sure—to film some Irving Berlin songs and showcase Crosby’s singing and Astaire’s dancing.  If it had been a stage production it would have been a Berlin revue.  Crooner Jim Hardy (Crosby) and hoofer Ted Hanover (Astaire) have been cabaret partners for many years but when Jim announces that he and his girlfriend, dancer Lila Dixon (Virginia Dale), the third member of their act, are going to leave show business, get married, and live on a farm he’s just bought in Connecticut, Ted counters that he and Lila are going out on their own as a duo.  Jim decides the time has come to retire and moves to his farmhouse and tries to settle into the country life.  He soon realizes that he’s not cut out to be a farmer and sees an opportunity to do something special.  He decides to open his farmhouse to the public as an inn with New York-quality entertainment, but only on major holidays.  Each holiday will have its own, elaborate, original production number.  (It seems that the farmhouse has an entrance hall as wide and deep as the stage at Radio City!  And as many empty rooms as . . . well, a vacant Holiday Inn.)  By happenstance, he meets Linda Mason (Marjorie Reynolds), a stage-struck wannabe singer and dancer and she joins him at Holiday Inn as a member of his troupe.  Things go well until Ted shows up after Lila has left him for a millionaire, and he sets his sights on Linda as his new partner.  Ted’s manager tells him of a potential offer from Hollywood—if he can seal the deal with Linda to join him.  The movie’s so well-known that most people know the ending, but just in case, I won’t let that kitty out of the poke.

The problem with the stage version is that, while it still has the Berlin score (augmented with some additional Berlin tunes from other sources; there are now 20 songs, plus reprises and a finale), the Roundabout didn’t have anyone matching the star quality of a Crosby (1903-77) and an Astaire (1899-1987).  (I don’t know who they could have cast—there are plenty of great male singers to choose from but I can’t think of a dancer of a Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly stature.)  The performers Roundabout cast—Bryce Pinkham (b. 1982; A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder; Tony Award nominee; see my Rick On Theater report, posted on 16 October 2014) as Jim Hardy, the Crosby role, and Corbin Bleu (b. 1989; In the Heights, Godspell; competed on Dancing with the Stars) as Ted Hanover, the Astaire part—were both competent, even good, musical actors, but not stars—which is what drove the movie (along with Berlin’s songs, which were then mostly new and he was at the top of the heap in ‘42—no longer a consideration in 2016).

The clearest example of this is the play’s and the movie’s opening song, a cabaret number meant to show off Bing’s crooning and Fred’s hoofing (while introducing the romantic triangle that’s a Leitmotif for the “plot”).  “I’ll Capture Your Heart” (or “I’ll Capture Your Heart Singing,” as it’s titled in the movie) is a musical duel between the singer Jim and the dancer Ted for the love of Lila.  (Both of the women in the movie, Dale, 1917-94, as Lila and Reynolds, 1917-97, as Linda Mason—dubbed by Martha Mears—were virtual unknowns.  The producers nixed the idea of casting  Ginger Rogers and  Rita Hayworth because they didn’t want two more astronomical salaries on top of Crosby’s and Astaire’s.  For that reason, the problem with the casting of the play is confined to the men.  The leading ladies on the stage were Megan Sikora as Lila and Lora Lee Gayer as Linda.)  The song, “I’ll Capture Your Heart,” isn’t that great—but the song-and-dance duel makes it work.  On stage, neither Pinkham nor Bleu was dazzling enough to animate the number—or the characters.

With a middling plot (Greenberg and Hodge made a few small changes, but nothing substantial), that leaves the Berlin score as the prop to hold the show up.  The original songs, however, were all (there were 14 of them) production numbers—there are no character songs (with one possible exception) and no narrative/plot songs in the whole score.  Jim sings “White Christmas” sitting at the piano for Linda, with whom he’s falling in love, but he wrote it “years ago” as a potential performance number “and stuck it in a drawer.”  Only the Valentine’s Day song, “Be Careful, It’s My Heart” (the song everyone, including Berlin, expected to be the hit from the movie—not “White Christmas”!) could be seen as a character number because Jim sings it as a love song to the girl.  But Cosby’s sitting at the piano with his back to the stage and Astaire enters above him and whisks Linda into a Ginger Rogers-ish lavish dance routine that ends with the two of them bursting through a paper heart in the finale—turning the song into another production number.

Greenberg and Hodge dropped some of the holiday songs and slipped in some other Berlin songs (“Blue Skies,” “Heat Wave”) to create some musical character and plot moments, but they barely work.  The result it a wan musical (which has never been restaged here since 2016-17 even though it’s essentially a Christmas season story that by rights ought to be a holiday family show).  Oddly, the adapters made two changes in the script, one of which complicates a small bit of the movie’s logic.  In the movie, the character of Linda, the girl with whom Jim falls in love in Connecticut, is a would-be singer-dancer.  She gets the gig at Holiday Inn after meeting Jim at a night club in New York where he’d gone to see his old partner, Ted, and his earlier love interest, Lila.  The Leitmotif I mentioned earlier is that Jim falls in love with the female performer in their act, then Ted steals her and whisks her off away.  So Ted sees Linda at the inn (Lila’s left him by now) and wants her as his new dancing partner.  When a potential Hollywood gig comes up, Linda’s tempted and leaves Jim for Ted and the movies.  Okay, it’s a cliché, but movie-Linda’s wanted to be a performer since her character was introduced in the first couple of scenes, so it’s moderately believable—at least for Holiday Inn.

In the stage version, Linda’s the daughter of the original owner of the farm Jim buys in Connecticut  She plays the piano a little, but she’s not headed for a performing career until she starts doing Jim’s holiday shows.  She teaches fifth grade in the local school.  It strains the play’s already tenuous rationale for stage play-Linda to be enticed to go off to Hollywood with Ted—whom she’s barely just met—instead of staying home at the farm/inn she loves.  (She shows up on the day Jim moves in ostensibly to pick up some family mementoes left behind.  It’s clear, though, that she really just wants to meet the man who bought her home.)  You just have to overlook this logical glitch so that the plot can move on!

(Ironically, the other change provided the play’s best performance—by a 13-year-old actor playing precocious, 10-year-old Charlie Winslow, one of Linda’s pupils.  The role doesn’t exist in the film: he’s the son of the banker who holds the mortgage on the farm and serves as the messenger between the bank and Jim—always with dire news about notes being due and such.  Later there’s a lame joke about his being let go at the bank because of child-labor laws.  The kid actor, Morgan Gao, was a little too “professional children’s school” slick, but he had more personality and energy than all the grown-ups in the cast!)

The critical reception for the movie was nearly universally effusive.  The following’s a sampling of reviews from across the country as the picture opened in various cities.  In Variety, Abel Green dubbed the movie “a standout film” and added, “With those Berlin tunes, a strong story content and Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire for the marquee its an undeniable box office parlay, a winner all the way.”  He continued, “Loaded with a wealth of songs, it’s meaty, not too kaleidoscopic and yet closely knit for . . . tiptop filmusical entertainment.”  Green observed that “Mark Sandrich’s production and direction are more than half of the success of the picture.”  The director has helmed Berlin’s idea “with understanding and feeling . . . and consummate showmanship, verve and tempo.”  

The New York Times film reviewer, Theodore Strauss, labeling Holiday Inn a “light-heartedly patriotic musical,” announced that “Mr. Berlin still has created several of the most effortless melodies of the season—the sort that folks begin humming in the middle of a conversation for days afterward.”  He added, “Mark Sandrich, director and producer, has taken the inevitable melange of plot and production numbers and so deftly pulled them together that one hardly knows where the story ends and a song begins.”  Strauss asserted that all this success is “largely due to the casual performances of Bing Crosby, who can . . . turn an ordinary line into sly humor without seeming to try, and Fred Astaire, who still owns perhaps the most sophisticated pair of toes in Christendom.”  The Times reviewer caviled that “Mainly ‘Holiday Inn’ is a series of musical episodes” strung on the romantic triangles of Astaire, Crosby, Reynolds, and Dale.  He concludes, “It is all very easy and graceful; it never tries too hard to dazzle.”  Strauss concluded that "‘Holiday Inn’ offers a reason for celebration not printed in red ink on the calendar.”

The New York Herald Tribune’s Howard Barnes called the film “a tour-de-force” and observed, “It was first conceived as a stage revue and it betrays that fact on more than one occasion.”  Barnes added, “Without the peculiar conventions of the theater, from curtains to the physical presence of performers, the material has a tendency to become episodic and repetitious.”  He affirmed, “The music is what gives ‘Holiday Inn’ a solid fabric of entertainment.  The treatment puts over a musical show form which I thought was doomed to constant failure on the screen.”  It’s the score, asserted Barnes, that “establish whatever loose continuity the show boasts,” observing, “The wisps of plot are scarcely likely to keep you enthralled.”  The Trib reviewer felt:

Even the adroit scenario which Claude Binyon has dreamed up to inter-relate a series of musical numbers . . . has little sustaining dramatic interest.  That wouldn’t have mattered behind footlights.  That it matters little in this screen show is a tribute to fine craftsmanship in every department of the production.

In a notice signed only “R. F. W.” (I haven’t been able to identify the writer), the Wall Street Journal dubbed Holiday Inn “a sure-fire hit” for which Berlin “has written a magnificent score.”  The WSJ reviewer added that Crosby and Astaire “make this new picture one of the year’s finest entertainment treats.”  The Journalist concluded, “All in all, this is one of Hollywood’s finest offerings, and it may well deserve a place among 1942’s best.”

Edwin Schallert of the Los Angeles Times characterized Holiday Inn as “an easy-going sort of opus” and a “divertissement.”  The L.A. Times reviewer went on, “Decidedly on the up-beat is this ensemble of talents,” adding, “It can’t be said that ‘Holiday Inn’ overdoes itself in the plot department”; the screenplay’s plot and situations “may be tabulated as diverting enough,” while “[s]ongs and dancing do the most to entertain.”  Schallert asserted, “Behavior of the characters is not above reproach,” caviling about some of

Astaire’s and Crosby’s seemingly unjustified actions, but continued that “if they’d been left out there wouldn’t have been any plot at all.” 

The uncredited review in the Christian Science Monitor called Holiday Inn “a carefree musical film” and Berlin succeeded “partly because it is probably easier to write a tune around a holiday than to write a whole story around several holidays.”  The CSM reviewer complained that “the dialogue cannot be described as sparkling” and Berlin’s “tunes are pleasant without being particularly impressive.”  She or he also found “this association of Messrs. Crosby and Astaire seems less successful than the Crosby-Hope team [of the comic Road pictures].” 

In another review identified only with initials, “M. L. A.” said in the Boston Daily Globe when the movie finally arrived in Boston (in September), Crosby and Astaire “fans are doing everything but tearing up the seats in their enthusiasm.”  The reviewer declared, “There have been better musical pictures, there have been far better dramatic plots, but there has seldom been a picture which seemed to hit public taste more accurately.”  The Globe writer pointed out that the film “is pure and undiluted entertainment.  It requires no mental processes for its enjoyment.”  He or she affirmed, “Labelled ‘escapist’ in these times of stress [i.e., World War II, among other problems], it would be excellent fun and frolic no matter in what period of history we were living.”  The review-writer labeled Holiday Inn “lively, beautiful and sparkling” that’s also “carefree and gay.”  The Boston reviewer stated, “There’s youth and zest and grace about ‘Holiday Inn’ and all its players and it deserves the praise it gets from the obviously pleased patrons.” 

In the Chicago Daily Tribune, May Tinée declared, “‘Holiday Inn’ is like a clean, fresh, sweet scented wind, blowing away stale doldrums caused by a session [sic] of rum movies.”  She labeled the “concoction” of Crosby’s singing, Astaire’s dancing, a pair of “luscious . . . singing and dancing girls, . . . a bright and unusual story, gay tunes, fascinating dancing . . . why you have a dish guaranteed to tickle the movie palate of ANY film fan.”  Nelson B. Bell in the Washington Post characterized Holiday Inn as “gay and galloping entertainment,” for which the Post reviewer acknowledged “the picture’s lighthearted embellishments and musical embroideries” and “a well-defined, if tenuous, ‘plot.’”  “Out of this simple premise emerges something pretty elegant.”  

Show-Score, the theater-review survey website, calculated the critical record of Roundabout’s Holiday Inn based on 59 notices, but some were for previous stagings.  Based on only the New York reviews, I recalculated the average rating as 71 with a high score of 90 (Deadline, Edge New York) backed up by seven 85’s (including Broadway World, New York Daily News, Variety); the site’s lowest score was  a 20 for the Wall Street Journal below a 30 for Upstage-Downstage.  The review ratings for the Broadway production broke down to 72% positive, 17% mixed, and 11% negative.  My round-up will cover 19 reviews.

In Long Island’s Newsday, Linda Winer’s “Bottom Line” was “Predictable and perky holiday fare with some first-rate actors.”  She characterized the adaptation as having “the feel of a holiday perennial that has been returning from storage or been on the road for years,” which the Newsday reviewer deemed an indication that the adaptors “are professional about coloring within the lines of expectations.”  Winer felt, however, “For those hoping that the Roundabout Theatre Company had ambitions more challenging than perky audience bait to compete with the other moneymaking holiday offerings, well, hope elsewhere.”  In her conclusion, the Long Island review-writer wondered, “If walls had ears, what would Studio 54, disco home of ’70s debauchery, make of this hokey, wholesome new occupant?  If the walls had eyes, I suspect they would roll.”

Matt Windman of amNew York labeled the show “essentially a remake of a remake of a remake.”  (He’s counting the 1954 movie White Christmas—which had its own Broadway adaptation back in 2008—as one remake, plus previous stage versions of Holiday Inn from 2008 and 2009.)  While parceling out faint praise for the plot (“sentimental, old-fashioned”), setting (“cozy”), songs (“lovely”), performances (“decent”), Windman found the show “only occasionally springs to life . . . and too often feels like another generic jukebox musical or holiday attraction.”  He added, “Its attempts to add comedy by mocking the innocence of the genre reek of desperation.” 

Alexis Soloski dubbed Holiday Inn “a wan jukebox musical” in the U.S. edition of The Guardian (while punning that Roundabout “has entered hostel territory”), and she pointed out, “The story has an old-timey predictability that may delight those with more conservative tastes.”  Soloski warned, however, that “no real effort has been made to differentiate this show from the other recent Berlin offering, White Christmas, or to integrate the songs into the show.”  She also advised, “You can check out anytime you like, and chances are that one will—and quite often—as the leaden dialogue trudges to its close.”  Though “the Berlin tunes” are “a treat,” “[s]everal of the production numbers are lackluster.”  Partly “because the book is so thin,” Soloski found the acting “variable.”  She also judged that “Greenberg’s direction doesn’t veer from the expected.”  The Guardian reviewer concluded, “It’s too much to expect a musical to provide maid service or a mint on every seat, but if a new musical ever needed fresh linens, it’s this one.”

In the Wall Street Journal (which received Show-Score’s lowest rating), Terry Teachout dismissed the production in a single paragraph (under 200 words).  Holiday Inn “is less a show than a cash machine, a cynical repurposing of the beloved 1942 Bing Crosby-Fred Astaire film that exists solely to make as much money as possible.”  Teachout scolded, “It’s slick, synthetic and soulless, a musical full of robotic jokes and devoid of genuine romance.”  He labeled Pinkham and Bleu “uncharismatic” and said that they “are to Crosby and Astaire what a Whopper is to a New York strip.”  In the New York Daily News, Joe Dziemianowicz advised his readers, “If you’re in the mood for show that’s light-on-its-feet and wall-to-wall Irving Berlin, check into Broadway’s “Holiday Inn.’”  The “airy tale,” he reported, is “familiar and vanilla-flavored fluff, but with tasty sprinkles.”  (Dziemianowicz was even more parsimonious than Teachout; he expended fewer than 125 words!)

Making the frequent observation that the “Christmas season seems to start earlier every year,” Charles Isherwood noted in the New York Times, “This year, the Roundabout Theater Company has obliged all whose hearts are already pining for candy canes and mistletoe by presenting ‘Holiday Inn,’ a perky but bland stage adaptation of the 1942 movie.”  Asserting that the original songs from the film are “mostly not top-drawer Berlin,” Isherwood found, “The interpolated songs are integrated into the plot smoothly enough, without lifting the show’s mild temperature or bringing new definition to the characters.”  The Timesman also reported that the choreography was “more workmanlike than inspired.”  The reviewer’s conclusion was:

Actually, “Holiday Inn” wore out its welcome for me well before the inevitable reprise of “White Christmas” that comes toward the close.  As a familiar Broadway exercise in nostalgia—or a familiar Broadway exercise in holiday exploitation—it’s polished and pleasant.  But a great gift to the theater season aborning it’s not.  More like a prematurely hung Christmas stocking smelling faintly of mothballs.

Robert Feldberg of the Bergen County, New Jersey, Record described Holiday Inn as  “old-fashioned—but in a very pleasant way,” explaining, “It doesn’t poke smug fun at itself, or, at the other end of the attitude spectrum, pretend with a straight face that tastes haven’t changed in 75 years.”  Feldberg felt that the production “takes an appealing middle ground. It says, in effect, we know the story is hokey, and we might wink at it a bit, but we’re going to treat the characters and their feelings with respect.”  The “main job” of the book, the Record reviewer thought, “is to provide a . . . framework for a cascade of Berlin numbers, with a fair portion of the dialogue functioning as song cues.”  He found, however, that the original film score was “fairly pedestrian,” so it had to be “bolstered” by songs from other sources.  Feldberg’s final assessment was: “Though ‘Holiday Inn’ might be a musical constructed according to a formula, it’s a winning example of the type.  Forgettable, perhaps, but fun while you’re watching it.”

On NJ.com, Christopher Kelly, the reviewer for the Newark Star-Ledger declared that Holiday Inn, which he said “is as brightly colored and intellectually nuanced as your average commercial for Froot Loops cereal,” “is no one’s idea of groundbreaking or cutting-edge.”  It is, however, “directed with generosity and warmth” and “wears down all defenses.”  The Star-Ledger reviewer felt that the book “doesn’t always make sense,” but the Berlin music and the singing and dancing make up for it.  He asserted that the show “ultimately lacks the imagination or ambition” of the then-recent American in Paris adaptation (see my report and one by Kirk Woodward, posted on Rick On Theater on 2 August 2015 and 13 November 2015, respectively), but concluded, “Flaws and all, ‘Holiday Inn’ leaves you unreservedly happy—these days, no small feat.”

“In a season of American agita, the Roundabout serves a nice glass of warm milk,” its adaptation of Holiday Inn, quipped the New Yorker in “Goings On About Town.”  “Don’t expect an iota of irony,” warned the anonymous reviewer; “like Jim, the show longs for simpler pleasures, and delivers them by way of well-polished choreography, familiar tunes, and two debonair leading men.”

Jesse Green, writing on Vulture for New York magazine, dubbed the show “a jukebox” musical, with the “shoehorning of songs from one context into another,” forcing “other songs to fit into the story,” and making “the portions . . . too small or too jammed together to enjoy.”  Green proclaimed “Holiday Inn is . . . less a ‘New Irving Berlin Musical’ [it’s official subtitle] than a new Irving Berlin medley.”  He thought it was “intentional” to use “the cover of old-fashioned family entertainment to excuse the let’s-throw-it-all-on-the-stage aesthetic.”  He asserted, “The emphasis on brightness and speed is so extreme that the show too often feels paradoxically dim and tiresome.”  Green ended with the lament that “all the charm in the world could not compensate for the reverse alchemy that has turned Berlin gold into brass plate, and Holiday Inn into Labor Day.”

In Variety, Frank Rizzo declared that Holiday Inn “has gotten a complete and first-class stage redo at Roundabout Theatre Company, turning this shaky fixer-upper into prime property that should please audiences looking for an easy-on-the-eyes, none-too-taxing escape.”  Greenberg and Hodge “have significantly rethought, reshaped and revitalized the script, giving the show more heart, a slightly modern sensibility and a joyful spirit.”  Rizzo concluded, “This clever musical should have longer legs than the Yule-centric stage version of ‘Irving Berlin’s White Christmas,’ especially for those yearning for an old-fashioned respite from political angst.”

David Cote of Time Out New York described Roundabout’s Holiday Inn as “renovated and refurbished,” but added, “Sure, there’s more corn and cheese served in this earnest, sweater-vested affair than any nutritionist would approve, but what harm in a cup of early eggnog?”  Melissa Rose Bernardo announced, “There’s virtually nothing new about Holiday Inn,” in Entertainment Weekly.  The characters “are so stock they’re practically cardboard” and “the ‘plot’ . . . is pretty much just a clothesline on which to hang Berlin’s songs,” the EW reviewer pointed out.  “Still, you’d have to be a total Grinch not to melt even a little” at the Berlin score. 

Frank Scheck’s “Bottom Line” in the Hollywood Reporter was “The Irving Berlin songs work their magic in this formulaic but sweet-hearted musical” and he proclaimed, “So sweetly wholesome that you experience a sugar rush while watching it, the show is corny and predictable.”  Scheck reported, “Although the story is more fleshed out than in the film, the rudimentary book . . . fails to develop the characters beyond thin archetypes.  Instead it relies on a plethora of clichéd jokes.”  He ended advising, “There may be lulls in between, but this is a Holiday Inn you'll want to check into.”

Roma Torre on NY1, the proprietary local news channel of the Spectrum cable TV service, complained, “‘Holiday Inn’ emerges as a quasi-jukebox musical that's pretty much by the numbers,” despite the “iconic music,” “terrific dancing,” “tweaked” story, and “added” songs.  Though the “musical numbers are sublime,” Torre wished “the story that frames these delightful songs didn’t feel so forced.  Granted, it was hokey in the movies, but its requisite charms are diminished here.”  The characters are “underwritten,” “lacking the kind of motivation that compels audiences to care.”  Torre concluded, “‘Holiday Inn’ is pleasant enough, but when I think of its musical peers from the era . . ., it’s more workaday by comparison.”

On Theatre Reviews Limited, Michele Willens declared that Holiday Inn “heavily depends on first class singers and dancers as well as classy production values,” which she felt the Roundabout production had.  Willens warned, however, that theatergoers would be disappointed “[i]f you are seeking conflict or edge.”  Michael Bracken of Theater Pizzazz observed that this Holiday Inn is “more self-aware than the original: it gently—perhaps too gently—pokes fun at itself.”  He called it “a grown-up ‘Let’s put on a show!’ show.”  Bracken felt that “Greenberg and Hodge’s book does not measure up to Berlin’s score,” and “you wish it would make up its mind to be either parody or pastiche.  Instead, it’s noncommittal, changing the story’s window dressing without changing what’s in the window.”  In the end, however, Bracken felt, “That doesn’t mean that Holiday Inn, in Greenberg’s otherwise steady hands, is anything less than surefire entertainment. You just can’t help wishing it could have made it to the next level.”

On Talkin’ Broadway, Matthew Murray offered “congratulations” to Roundabout's Holiday Inn, which, “[d]espite doing absolutely nothing new, . . . managed to push contemporary theatrical escapism to dizzying, unheard-of heights.”  “Usually,” Murray noted, shows that are basically “just out to give you a good time,” “give you an ounce or two of meat with your foot-tall mound of Cool Whip.”  (I’m not sure I’d really want meat with fake whip cream—but I get what Murray means.)  “After all,” the TB revewer added, “it’s not easy to swallow sugar for two hours straight without feeling ill.”  But Holiday Inn “doesn’t mind.  Its selling point is” the Berlin score.  “Much like the film, it’s just an excuse for showcasing a bevy of themed Berlin tunes coordinated with the performances” at the inn.  Murray’s big lament, though, was that, though “all shows committed to purveying empty calories should do so as competently as this one does, and its verve makes it utterly unhatable,” he “can't help wishing those involved had wanted to do more with such tantalizing raw components.”

Comparing White Christmas, another Berlin movie musical that was adapted for the stage (Broadway, 2008-09), with Holiday Inn, Steven Suskin of the Huffington Post pronounced the latter “A decidedly better and more enjoyable film than ‘White Christmas,’” but was “rather” surprised “to find that Holiday Inn . . . makes a decidedly weaker stage attraction.”  Suskin labeled Holiday Inn “an unassuming and unchallenging musical, and an ineffectively assembled one at that.”  He advised, “Audiences looking for something gentle, built on bouncy Berlin melodies, might well be pleased.”  The HP reviewer had problems with the story, “which in the film dutifully plows ahead,” but in the stage adaptation, “halts again and again at Studio 54 while we get a handful of ballads that prolong the sleepy evening.”  He concluded, “Audiences looking for a non-challenging, 100% old-fashioned musical might well have an altogether swell time at Holiday Inn.  But the overall effect is dampened, as if everything but that firecracker [dance] number was staged with soggy powder.” 

(I never mentioned the “Let’s Say It with Firecrackers” dance that both Astaire and Bleu perform; many reviews mention it with great delight.  Ted does a solo dance—for the Fourth of July, natch—tapping as he throws firecrackers and “torpedo” crackers on the stage floor.  Both renditions were truly spectacular showstoppers.)

[I hadn’t ever seen the stage version of Holiday Inn, which is why I watched the WNET broadcast.  Then when the movie came on cable, I thought it would be interesting to see it so close to the play.  I just thought the juxtaposition of the play and the film was fortuitous—like one trip I made to Washington, D.C., 11 years ago, when my Mom and I saw She Loves Me at Arena Stage and, the same week, TCM aired both The Shop Around the Corner, the 1940 film adaptation of the original straight play, Parfumerie, and In the Good Old Summertime, the 1949 movie-musical adaptation starring Judy Garland and Van Johnson.  (It didn’t run You’ve Got Mail, the 1998 rom-com update, which I thought was a shame.  I posted a report on Arena’s staging on ROT on 22 July 2016 in “Two Looks Back.”)]