"Gutenberg! The Musical' at Ambler

Gutenberg! The Musical!— notice those exclamation points — is an over-the-top takeoff on a backers' audition where aspiring playwrights present their creation in a bid for financial support from Broadway producers in the audience.

The ostensible subject matter— the invention of movable type in 1439 and the printing of the Gutenberg Bible— is secondary. That's a shame, because Johann Gutenberg's invention was a cultural and historical landmark.

Time"“Life magazine and the A & E Network separately picked Gutenberg as the most influential person of the second millennium and his invention as the most important of that thousand-year period. "What the world is today, good and bad," Mark Twain wrote, "it owes to Gutenberg." Marshall McLuhan said that Gutenberg laid the basis for the modern knowledge-based economy and the spread of learning to the masses. The man was unique.

The idea of neophytes trying to create a show, on the other hand, is old stuff. The most successful was Mel Brooks's The Producers, and one of the cleverest was [title of show], by Jeff Bowen and Hunter Bell, produced off-Broadway in 2004.

Bored without books

Those would-be producers were endearing. Gutenberg's fictional writer and composer are inept simpletons, awkward in their desperate efforts to please us. They describe themselves with platitudes: "I love to make music." "I live in a studio apartment and I used to own a cat."

The script, written in 2005, informs us that we know next to nothing about Gutenberg's life, so the writers have made up the plot. Their Gutenberg is a wine presser in the medieval German town of Schlimmer, which the songwriters rhyme with glimmer, slimmer and trimmer. A baby dies when the father gives him jellybeans instead of medicine because he can't read the label. Townspeople sit around with nothing to do because they can't read. Gutenberg's girlfriend complains in song, "I can't read him/ He's all Greek to me."

By contrast, the real-life creators of Gutenberg!— Scott Brown and Anthony King— worked for a theatrical company, reading new scripts and listening to the sales pitches of neophyte writers. Their Gutenberg isn't really about Gutenberg (who worked as a blacksmith and goldsmith in Mainz and once tried to sell "holy mirrors" to pilgrims); instead it's a satire on the awkward mediocrity of many theater projects.

Topnotch cast

But this is like shooting fish in a barrel. The real satirical challenge lies in satirizing Broadway's successes, as was done in The Musical of Musicals (The Musical!), the 2003 show in which Joanne Bogart and Eric Rockwell spoofed the creations of Sondheim, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Kander & Ebb et al.

The satirical tunes are catchy, but their prototype is rock and contemporary music, not classic Broadway.

The novice showmen are played here by Tony Braithwaite and Steve Pacek, two fine comic actors. They're breathtakingly funny as their characters pitch their new musical— narrating its plot, playing all its parts and singing its songs. Their expressiveness and their timing are excellent. Sonny Leo superbly plays their exasperated piano accompanist. Tom Quinn, Montgomery's artistic director, injects the proper exaggerated hyperactivity.