THE 1977 movie “Saturday Night Fever” had flash, excitement, a crackling youthfulness, a pulsing Bee Gees score and John Travolta.
Alas, it also had a stupid plot (Tony Manero leaves Brooklyn for the glories of Manhattan), two ridiculously caricatured women, and some snooze-inducing subplots.
With amazing precision, the 1999 Broadway musical “Saturday Night Fever” jettisons everything exciting in the movie and lovingly preserves everything mediocre.
The producers chose a nice kid, James Carpinello, to imitate Travolta in gesture, stance and intonation. It’s a disastrous idea, for we keep referring back to the original, and Carpinello can’t compare.
His singing is at best adequate, and his dancing is of the twirl-and-freeze school. He’s all pose. At least in “Footloose,” asimilar and similarly targeted show, the lead doesn’t have to ape Kevin Bacon.
The show doesn’t even evoke Brooklyn. Robin Wagner’s sets look cheap and bare: Some painted signs give us a street; the Verrazano bridge is a few girders; the disco is tawdry and makes its 16 pulsing floor squares visible only in a mirror.
The Bee Gees songs are here but watered down and juiceless, as they have to be sung by the cast instead of just heard on the soundtrack. Choreographer Arlene Phillips has forgotten, if she ever knew, what disco was. She creates solemn, pseudo-ballets for the final (and dully anticlimactic) dance contest.
The tedious plot is preserved intact by adapter Nan Knighton, like a toad in ice.
Tony ditches a whiny girl in a red dress – played by the single-named Orfeh, who uses her fine voice to lament “If I Can’t Have You.”
He falls for an uppity secretary in a blue dress: Paige Price, keeping all the unfunny bimbo patter of Karen Lynn Gorney. Even the goofball has a song before he falls off the Verrazano bridge.
The show’s creators don’t get it. We don’t care about these characters. We just want to see them wisecrack and dance. An invigorating movie has been turned into a lugubrious downer.
The funniest thing about “Fever” may be its depiction of penniless Brooklyn youngsters easily moving into swank Manhattan apartments. Nowadays, it’s Manhattanites desperate to escape impossible rents who are moving onto Tony Manero’s block.
At the Minskoff, Broadway at 45th Street; call (212) 307-4100.