The subsequent ones, however, don't match the new lyrics to the originals; they're all predicated on the concept that the familiarity of a show tune will automatically render hilarious whatever lyric you substitute, no matter how banal and obvious. So "If I Were a Bell" from Guys and Dolls becomes "If I Were Your Car," "Almost Like Being in Love" turns into "Almost Like Being on Drugs," and so on. Jonathan Luke Stevens is the hard-working young singer-dancer featured in these medleys as "Dream Rusty." We're also supposed to fall about when members of the ensemble show up in cat costumes or dressed as the Master of Ceremonies in Cabaret. Still, the dream ballets provide a respite from Wartofsky's music, which is so random and shapeless you marvel that the singers, who range from highly competent to quite talented, were able to learn it. Car Talk: The Musical!!! is only 90 minutes long without intermission, but time, as every theatergoer knows, is relative.
Related:
How to tell the truth, Xanadu from SpeakEasy; Avenue Q at Lyric Stage, New Rep and W.H.A.T. paint a Pollock, More 
- How to tell the truth
You may never have been so upset about being a twentysomething virgin that you hired a sexual surrogate for professional help, but odds are that if you had you’d just gulp and keep it to yourself.
- Xanadu from SpeakEasy; Avenue Q at Lyric Stage
Those who know their Coleridge will recall that: "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately roller-dome decree."
- New Rep and W.H.A.T. paint a Pollock
Fortunately, Elvis Costello's dictum that writing about music is like dancing about architecture doesn't apply to playwrights taking on the world of art, which has been the subtext for three provocative Boston-area plays recently.
- Next to Normal is good therapy
Well, why not.
- Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is unrealized Wilson
For years you could measure the difference between the Huntington Theatre Company and the American Repertory Theater as the difference between August Wilson, the gritty and lyrical chronicler of African-American life, and Robert Wilson, the avant-garde auteur.
- Chad Deity is a knockout
The old actors' adage "Break a leg" does not seem an apt shout-out to the intrepid cast of The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity.
- Marie Antoinette rules at ART
Last year, dramatist David Adjmi raised a stir with a site-specific tea party called Elective Affinities , in which four-time Tony winner Zoe Caldwell held court in an Upper East Side townhouse, spinning a small audience into her web of entitlement.
- Out of Afghanistan
Matthew Spangler's stage adaptation of The Kite Runner is so faithful to Khaled Hosseini's 2003 bestseller that you might think the novel a religion.
- Good People could be better
Good People , which opens the SEASON at the Huntington Theatre Company, is a schizoid experience.
- Baffled in Boise
Samuel D. Hunter's A Bright New Boise, receiving its Boston premiere in a production by the Zeitgeist Stage Company, has no dramatic structure.
- Hickory Schtick: Andrew Jackson is bloody good
Ever since Richard Nixon lost an election by sweating on TV, we have held this truth to be self-evident: America prefers a sexier president.
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Theater
, Theater, Suffolk, NPR, More
, Theater, Suffolk, NPR, car talk, arts features, Less
