Cry-Baby

FRENCH CONNECTION Snyder, left, and Stanley swap spit.

Photograph: Joan Marcus

The central conflict (if you will) in the mostly mediocre Cry-Baby—a sanitized Broadway adaptationof the 1990 John Waters flick—is between the straight-arrow Squares and the greasy, lawbreaking Drapes. These teen camps represent the opposing forces of upper-class conformity and lower-class raffishness in 1954 Baltimore. And wouldn’t you know it: This multimillion-dollar spectacle dresses and sneers like a leather-jacketed outcast, but turns out to be as squeaky-clean and edgeless as a country-club preppy.

Hackwork and bad casting mar what could have been a decent addition to the teen-fluff tradition of Hairspray and Legally Blonde. There’s a bland, tired book by Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan, and a homogenized 1950s rockabilly score by Adam Schlesinger. In the title role of Cry-Baby Walker, Broadway newcomer James Snyder is bizarrely lightweight, lacking both sexual heat and comic chops. A glorified chorus boy working hard to conceal his flop sweat, Snyder drags down his costar, the pretty but uninspired Elizabeth Stanley, who plays Allison, the good girl who wants to be bad.

What the production has going for it are clever, biting lyrics by David Javerbaum and a handful of zestfully manic supporting clowns as Drapes and Squares. But the true hero of the night is choreographer Rob Ashford, who crafts terrifically slinky, sleazy moves (especially for the Drapes) and a boffo Act II prison sequence. Every time the toothsome ensemble breaks into dance, you’ll weep with gratitude.