‘Gutenberg! The Musical!’ Review: Revenge of the Broadway Nerds

I know we could all use a good laugh nowadays. But would you settle for a thousand chuckles?

Because that’s what “Gutenberg! The Musical!” is offering. In the two-man, 20-character skit of a show that opened Thursday evening on Broadway, the jokes are abundant, interchangeable and lightweight: comedy as packing peanuts.

If that suggests an inconsequential payload, well, perhaps consequential was not what the writers, Scott Brown and Anthony King, and the director, Alex Timbers, were after. Silliness crossed with satire seems to be their target, and with the help of two expert farceurs, Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells, they do hit the silliness bull’s-eye. The satire, I’m not so sure.

But let’s enjoy what we can. Gad plays Bud Davenport and Rannells is Doug Simon, loserish 40-something co-workers at a nursing home in New Jersey. Bitten by the Broadway bug, they decide to collaborate on a musical, despite a rudimentary knowledge of the genre and an advanced lack of talent. When Bud, the sweaty, impulsive one, inherits money from an uncle who recently started (and then suddenly stopped) hang gliding, they get their chance: They rent the James Earl Jones Theater for a bare-bones reading in hopes of acquiring a backer. Doug, the button-down one with the toggle-switch smile, chips in by selling his parents’ house.

What we see on the stage of the Jones is the deliberately horrible result. Bud has written the music and Doug the book (and both of them the lyrics) for a show about the 15th-century German inventor who gives the show its title. Having discovered from a Google search that reliable information about Gutenberg is “scant,” Bud and Doug are relieved of the responsibility to historical truth that is apparently so burdensome to the creators of most biomusicals. About the inventor of movable type, they can make everything — not just most of it — up.

So their Gutenberg is, counterfactually, a “wine presser” in the nonexistent town of Schlimmer; his wine press is what inspires his printing press. (“I’m gonna take the grapes out and put letters in,” he sings. “Put letters where them grapes have been.”) But a mad monk who is not a fan of literacy denounces the new technology and leads the townsfolk to burn its inventor at the stake. A familiar moral is drawn from that fake history: “Gutenberg’s death did not stop his dream,” a laborer steps out of time to tell us.

Or rather, Doug does, because he and Bud, having spent all their money on the rental of the theater, were unable to afford a cast. Instead, with the help of 99 custom-printed trucker hats to identify the dramatis personae, and another 25 that become a kind of puppet chorus line, they narrate the show and play all the characters in it. These include Dead Baby, Beef Fat Trimmer, Feces, Two Drunks, Antisemitic Flower Girl and of course the printer’s love interest, a wench named Helvetica. Her big number (sung by Bud, petting his imaginary tresses) is “I Can’t Read.”