Critics Wash Out ‘Suds’ : Hit San Diego Play Takes Drubbing Off Broadway

The New York Post was the only New York daily to find something to love in “Suds,” the San Diego-produced musical that opened Sunday at the Off-Broadway Criterion Center after breaking all box office records at the Old Globe Theatre.

“ ‘Waiting for Godot’ it isn’t,” conceded the Post’s Jerry Tallmer. But, “it is all in good fun, and it is quite good fun.”

As for the others, how did they trash it? Let us count the ways.

According to Mel Gussow of the New York Times, “ ‘Suds’ is about as exciting as watching an endless cycle of wash and spin-dry as a radio plays pop and rock in the background.”

Don Nelson of The New York Daily News described it as “mindless nostalgia.” For Michael Kuchwara, the AP drama critic, what sank “Suds” was its “dumb . . . dippy story.” Stephen Williams of Newsday called the show “gooey and sticky-sweet . . . the kind of thing you’d expect to see in a high school auditorium. . . . Fab it isn’t, and ‘Suds’ deserves only a small Cheer.”

The performers--Melinda Gilb, Steve Gunderson, Susan Mosher and Christine Sevec--fared better than the material, which Gilb, Gunderson and co-producer Bryan Scott wrote. Tallmer described them as “an all-out, straight-out, knock-’em-in-the-aisles cast of four, often dueling mano a mano to top one another as the spectators cheer.”

Gilb was the favorite of most of the other critics. Gussow said Gilb’s brassy vocalizing was the one “partial antidote to the evening’s ingenuousness,” Williams singled out Gilb and Mosher for their “sassy” delivery, and Nelson suggested that Gilb and Gunderson showed talent “that might better have been displayed elsewhere.”

Kuchwara, however, granted that Gilb, Mosher and Sevec belted out the songs “with gusto” but “not any particular style.”