Ouch! Happy not to be peddling a show this week. Particularly after reading the soul-crushing career-annihilating reviews of IT SHOULDA BEEN YOU and FINDING NEVERLAND in the Times. Not that I didn’t call it, if you’re a regular follower of this blog, regarding FL, a few weeks back. You can’t always just chuck stacks of cash at a production and hit gold. Produced at a far more humble budget than 13 Million, IN BETWEEN RIVERSIDE AND CRAZY just won the Pulitzer this week, and though I don’t see a Broadway run in its future, I’d be surprised if worthy playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis doesn’t have a play on the GWW in the next 18 months. Another MTAT prediction—we’ll see, won’t we…

Anyway, Ben Brantley outdid himself and as usual, I must say, he’s not wrong. I’ve drastically edited these to highlight the nastiest bits for your reading pleasure:

IT SHOULDA BEEN YOU reviewed by Sir Ben Brantley for The New York Times

“The last big wedding-themed show I remember on Broadway was “A Catered Affair” (2008), a singing adaptation of Paddy Chayefsky’s 1956 movie that turned the sentimental tale of a blue-collar bride into a dishwater-gray dirge. “It Shoulda Been You” takes the opposite tack. It’s so aggressively bubbly it gives you the hiccups. Or do I mean acid reflux? In any case, it’s not easy to swallow.”

“There’s not an element in “It Shoulda Been You” that hasn’t been used, and wrung dry, before. Adding latter-day twists to this cocktail of clichés somehow makes it taste all the flatter.”

FINDING NEVERLAND reviewed by the Honorable Ben Brantley for The New York Times

“The stage version of “Finding Neverland” is no replica of the film, though it might have been better if it were. Instead, it heightens the screenplay’s sentimentality, tidy psychologizing and life-affirming messages by thickening their syrup and corn quotients in ways presumably deemed palatable to theatergoing children and their parents. The show brings to mind those supersize sodas sold in movie theaters, which Mayor Michael Bloomberg once quixotically campaigned against.

Like such drinks, “Finding Neverland” is largely made up of empty calories. Perhaps the nutrients were leached out of it by its long and arduous gestation. First presented in Leicester, England, in 2012, the show was reborn and completely retooled at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., where I saw it last summer.”

RIP. I mean, I assume FN’s pop culture link to oblivious TKTS-ers will keep it afloat for a year to eighteen months but good night, ISBY. And producers, stop giving popular actors, directing jobs. Nobody ever made money casting Steven Spielberg as an action hero. Let people do what they do best and stop trying to make a buck with a familiar name in a role that’s not even relevant to their popularity. David Hyde Pierce’s voiceover on the commercial is just a sad desperate attempt to link him to this piece. If ticket holders don’t get to see him on the day, it’s just irrelevant to them.

While we’re on a role, let’s take a look at some other scathing Brantley tidbits from seasons past. I scoured the net and my own memory for some of the juiciest. Enjoy!

BONNIE & CLYDE reviewed by Archduke Ben Brantley for The New York Times

“That Clyde Barrow is such a cutup. Why, the boy will do most anything to stir up his sluggish fellow Americans: slap at them, tickle them, shoot them in cold blood. He’ll even punch his fist clean through a wall and drive a big old car right onto the stage, just to try to get a rise out of somebody. But Clyde, honey, t’ain’t nothing you can do to raise the pulse of something that’s as near to dead as the show you’re in.

Bonnie & Clyde,” which opened on Thursday night at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, is a modest, mildly tuneful musical biography of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, the kissin’ outlaws from Texas who hijacked the American imagination during the Great Depression. It portrays its title characters (played by Laura Osnes and Jeremy Jordan) as restless, libido-charged young ’uns who are about to suffocate from the grayness of their dreary lives.”

GREASE (Revival) reviewed by his Royal Highness Ben Brantley for The New York Times

“But in live theater, if you’re a reasonably polite person, you stick with the show you’ve paid for, at least for the first act. With “Grease” this means that if you last until intermission, you sit through more than an hour of a musical set in a high school that feels like a musical put on by a high school — and I don’t mean a high school of performing arts.”

“But in none of these numbers does the level of performance rise in intensity, polish or even plain old fun. This revival is a reminder that even in the new democracy of fame, it takes more than a change of wardrobe to make a bona fide stage star.”

LOVE NEVER DIES reviewed by Dame Ben Brantley for The New York Times

“To think that all this time that poor old half-faced composer hasn’t been dead at all, just stewing in his lust for greater glory. Being the title character of “The Phantom of the Opera,” the most successful musical of all time, wasn’t enough for him. Oh, no. Like so many aging stars, he was determined to return — with different material and a rejuvenated body — to the scene of his first triumph. So now he’s back in the West End with a big, gaudy new show. And he might as well have a “kick me” sign pasted to his backside.”

“This poor sap of a show feels as eager to be walloped as a clown in a carnival dunking booth.”

“Its plot is so elaborate and implausible it makes the libretto of “Il Trovatore” read like a first-grade primer. If you don’t know the first “Phantom,” you will be very confused; if you do know the first “Phantom,” you will also be very confused.”

Here’s hoping that none of us ever find ourselves among this motley crew of penned punishment!