Listen: Martin Scorsese’s 1977 film, “New York, New York” wasn’t easy to begin with. It was so long and unwieldy that a 14 minute musical segment was excised from it for wide release. Even that didn’t work, so later it was added back in. Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli were terrific, but the story was always an issue. The songs — the title song and “But The World Goes Round” — nevertheless became hits.

Now why try and turn this into a Broadway musical? The version currently at the St. James Theater has no book, no story, and no idea what it’s supposed to be about. They’ve tossed most of the original movie story to make it a musical about “making it anywhere” like the famous song says. But it’s a mess. The original characters are thin and undeveloped. There’s a preposterous plot addition of a black and white main couple, something that in 1946 post-War New York is ridiculous. The show seems a lot like leftovers: scraps from “In the Heights” dropped onto “Chicago.” There’s also a fiddler on the street (he never gets to the roof).

Susan Stroman tried to direct this show, and I give her credit for some sparkling set pieces. One of them involves tap dancing on the famous 1932 high in the sky girder photograph called “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper.” (No big deal that this musical takes place 14 years later and that there’s no explanationfor why two main characters are even there– they’re musicians).. Another involves umbrellas. Stroman’s dancers glide even when they don’t seem to know what direction they’re gliding. Stroman, who’s so gifted, tries to make lemonade from lemons. But what she gets is Crystal Light.

De Niro’s Jimmy Doyle is played by a milquetoast named Colton Ryan. He doesn’t know whether he’s a good guy or a bad guy, a musician or a singer. Like all the actors, Ryan fakes playing instruments and it’s very disheartening especially after seeing Sean Hayes’s virtuoso rendition of “Rhapsody in Blue” in “Good Night, Oscar.” Doyle’s band is as fake as the show. Minnelli’s Francine is now Black, and played by Anna Uzele, who’s very good but no Minnelli. She’s also burdened with selling contemporary dialogue about race that would never have been broached in 1946. (Ironically, a real life Doyle — director John — is well known for staging musicals in which the actors actually play their instruments.)

Most of David Thompson’s book is strung together with non-sequiturs. Scenes start and don’t necessarily finish. We don’t know what these characters want, and they don’t seem eager to get it. A lot of musical numbers are supplied by secondary characters because Thompson has nothing pressing for Jimmy and Francine to do. And here’s something really weird: an incredibly talented performer named Allison Blackwell sings opera in the second for no apparent reason — first as a maid, then as a diva. She’s so good the audience goes wild. But she has no character name, and is only listed in the chorus. Of course, by the time this happens, we’d given up any hope of coherence. But someone should hire this woman immediately.

No one wants a big budget musical to fail. But just a few minutes in, you can smell “New York, New York” is a stinker. It will also take two hours and thirty five minutes before Francine sings the title song, which is all anyone wants to hear, anyway. The other songs? Aside from “World Goes Round,” they are all the same, plucked from the long ago stored trunk of John Kander and Fred Ebb. They are leftovers. One of them, called “Happy Endings,” could really be sung to the tune of “Pretty Women” from “Sweeney Todd.” Only one song, “Along Comes Love,” which opens the second act, feels like a lost gem.

How did this show get 12 nominations from the Outer Critics Circle? It’s lunacy. But look at those nominations: there isn’t one for Best Book of a Musical. That’s because even the OCC could not find a through-line, a story, or anything that holds “New York, New York” together. That should be very telling.

So what is the Best New Musical of 2023? I’m thinking it’s “Some Like it Hot,” which I loved and still recommend. Compared to this show, “Some Like it Hot” is “My Fair Lady.”

Last year I wrote about the Outer Critics Circle and how they lost all credibility with their kooky nominations. A couple of their members actually sent me hate mail. So what will they do this year?

The OCC is now composed of people you’ve never heard of, for the most part. They had weird ideas about who’s eligible for their awards. Fine. If their members want to pay for this, it’s their business. But the awards are negligible now, which is too bad.

So this year their “snubs” are similar to last year: with the exception of Sean Hayes and Jessica Chastain, they do not like “stars,” no matter how good they are. Last year Hugh Jackman led the list. This year, their biggest omission is Wendell Pierce as Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman.” They should be arrested on the spot.

The OCC also left out Josh Groban, Annaleigh Ashford, and Gaten Matarazzo from “Sweeney Todd.” They nominators must be smoking crack. They cut everyone who isn’t “famous” from “The Piano Lesson” including John David Washington and Samuel L. Jackson. “The Piano Lesson” wasn’t even nominated for Outstanding Revival of a Play. There’s only one nominated actor from “Leopoldstadt,” Brandon Uranowitz. That’s insane. They also thumbed their noses at Yahya Abdul-Mateen II from “Top Dog/Underdog.”

So, who cares? The OCC’s newest administrative problem is gender-free nominations, and limiting each category to five nominees. Last night I heard one of them, sitting behind me at “New York, New York,” which received 12 nominations, saying it was their “second time” at this show. Hmmm.

The only important awards on Broadway are the Tonys. The Obies are Off Broadway. Everything else is just subjective nonsense.

“Will & Grace” star Sean Hayes has a secret life as an accomplished pianist besides being a terrific comic actor. If we didn’t quite grasp the former, we’ve got it now. He opened on Broadway last in a tour de force performance as real life composer-conductor-gadfly-talk show host from the 1950s, Oscar Levant in a top notch new play called “Good Night Oscar.”

Apparently, Sean Hayes knows everyone in Hollywood, because they all turned up for the opening night. Michael Douglas (with new college graduate son Dylan), Steven Spielberg (he’s a producer on the play), Sandra Bullock with her 13 year old son Louis, Jennifer Aniston (accompanied by ex-husband Justin Theroux– no story there–they’re friends), Matthew Rhys, Matt Damon with wife Lucia, Jason Bateman, John Krasinski, Will Arnett, Carrie Preston, Cherry Jones, Cynthia Nixon, Steve Martin, Martin Short, Andrea Martin, Matthew Broderick, Broadway star Brooks Ashmanskas, Patricia Heaton, Rachel Dratch, Susie Essman, Corey Stoll, Raul Esparza, Arian Moayed (he plays Stewy on {“Succession”), Broadway’s Debra Monk, Paul Shaffer and legendary record producer Russ Titelman, plus Molly Ringwald, Julie Halston, “Leopoldstadt” star Brandon Uranowitz, a lot of the cast of “Parade,” and maybe more, I lost track of what was going on! (The lead producer is the estimable Frank Marshall.)

Oscar Levant was kind of Salieri to George Gershwin’s Mozart in Doug Wright’s beautifully written play. When Gershwin dies of a brain aneurysm at age 38, Levant is bereft. He thinks of himself as lost in Gershwin’s shadow, and creates a career not just as a composer, but as all the things above. He becomes a fixture on programs like “The Tonight Show with Jack Paar,” where he says outrageous things and gets a lot of press. Levant was so famous in the 40s and 50s his animated likeness is featured in cartoons.

But Levant’s also a schizophrenic with a huge drug and alcohol problem. So while he’s in demand, he’s also slowly killing himself. This is a problem for his wife, June, and their three daughters, of course. (He actually seems like he might have a form of Parkinson’s Disease, which wasn’t so well known sixty years ago.)

Hayes has been working on this musical for 11 years with Wright and director Lisa Peterson. He’s already starred, kind of wonderfully, in Neil Simon’s Bacharach-David musical, “Promises, Promises” with Kristen Chenoweth, so knows the lay of the land. I always think of Sean Hayes as chipper, from his TV show. So nothing prepares you for his portrayal of the sardonic, hilarious, deeply sad, deteriorating Levant. For two hours he’s never not on stage, in command of it all the time.

Levant is so verbally gifted and glib that Wright is able to turn Hayes’s version of him into a one line joke dispenser. So even when Levant is being mean or self -deprecating or semi-functioning in denial, the audience gets plenty of laughs to leaven the looming drama.

And then Hayes — who’s already proved himself — gets his big moment. Levant sits down on the Jack Paar show and plays a 7 minute version of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” Hayes really plays it, too, and he’s excellent. It’s an impassioned performance, one that will send every audience to its feet in the middle of the show. Extraordinary.

“Good Night, Oscar” benefits from a strong supporting cast, too, including Emily Bergl (she plays Tess on “Mrs. Maisel”), Marchant Davis, Ben Rappaport as Paar, Peter Grosz, and Alex Wyse. The play is not just a labor of love, it’s a tremendously satisfying night in the theater that will be a big part of this year’s Tony Awards.

photo of Sean Hayes, Louis Bullock, Sandra Bullock c2023 Showbiz411