In My Life (Broadway 2005)

The sign outside In My Life shows a blue sky with puffy clouds and bright yellow lemons. Despite some initial debate (will the musical be about people making lemons into lemonade, or lemonade into lemons?) that sign more or less sums it up. Or at least the flat surface of the sign (despite the wavy lettering) accurately reflects the depth of thinking that went into the musical.

It turns out that heaven is just like earth, except more boring. It is a gleaming, antiseptic place full of filing cabinets. (What is this obsession with filing cabinets? They were prominently featured in the movie Disclosure, as the supposedly high-tech virtual reality computer system known, ominously, as "The Corridor" was used solely to create ... a 3-D filing system. Yawn.)

To liven things up in heaven, people watch the proceedings on earth. And people are no wiser or more mature than they were in life. In fact, sometimes a wacky unsupervised angel may interfere with life on earth by staging wacky (soap) operas using real earthlings as the characters!

Meanwhile God, who is listed in the program under his preferred moniker, "Al", is a shabby, shuffling, unimpressive guy who likes to sing commercial jingles. (It is conceivable that this tripe was underwritten by Dr. Pepper or Volkswagen -- what better product placement than to be the subject of God's chosen jingles?) In one quick aside, Al apparently disavows Christianity. (Clever, that, eh? Slips right under the radar screen. It didn't get a laugh, or any reaction at all, on opening night. I think most people didn't even catch it.)

Moreover, Al is easily manipulated by a bunch of surgeons, angels and a lover singing "Not this day, not this night" to save the life of a boy with Tourette's syndrome -- the boy's life had been conscripted by the wacky angel for a tragic "opera" so he was scheduled for death. Don't worry, the Tourette's switches on and off as needed for the story to proceed and thus doesn't interfere with exposition. Supposedly, what Al is saving the boy from is not Tourette's, but a brain tumor pressing on the optic nerve to cause blindness rapidly followed by death. However, the MRI scans shown prominently to the audience do not actually show any abnormalities, so it is not clear why divine intervention is needed....

Well, I suppose it is heartening to see true love triumph. You can tell that it is true love between the Tourette's boy and the OCD girl because she goes to a diner to meet him after hearing his songs on the radio and informs him immediately that he's her soul mate, they immediately go to her apartment and have sex, and they sing separate post-coital songs about how they think this could be love. These things are rapidly followed by shacking up and then not one, but two marriage proposals between the pair. Then Al himself marries them, natch.