Before heading out to Cast Aside Productions’ latest show, Gutenberg! The Musical!, I googled Johannes Gutenberg, the man who in 1439 famously introduced movable type — and thus mass literacy — to Europe. I found a possible broken betrothal, a few bankruptcies, and lots of gaps in the historical record — slim pickings, I thought, for a musical. Turns out the young writers of Gutenberg!, Bud Davenport (Kyle Aarons) and Doug Simon (Ryan Walker), did exactly the same thing. And with so few facts to go on, they tell us, they’ve created a “historical fiction” of Gutenberg’s life. That’s putting it mildly. And Bud and Doug are themselves the creations of writers Anthony King and Scott Brown. Which is to say that the true subject of Gutenberg! is not Gutenberg, but the hallowed institution of the Broadway musical itself. Celeste! Green directs a show of impeccably performed send-up at the Portland Ballet Studio Theater.
What we watch, in King and Brown’s Gutenberg!, is Bud and Doug’s pitch of their creation: a two-hour reading of the show performed by the two of them. They wear literally a dozen different hats, which are bright yellow, helpfully labeled (“Gutenberg,” “Drunk #2,” “Rat,” “Beef Fat Trimmer”), and delivered. Bud and Doug are optimistically certain, to an audience that includes Big Broadway Producers. For some reason, they believe that these producers need explained to them such terms as “score,” “book,” “metaphor,” and a dozen or so other terms, and so we also get a guileless, genially pedantic primer on the principles of musical theater, even as they mangle every trope and tradition in its book.
