“It was very quick and he didn’t suffer,” Doug hastily adds.
How were these boobies able to rent the James Earl Jones Theatre for their reading? Bud explains that his uncle “recently started hang-gliding,” hand soars up, “and then recently stopped hang-gliding,” hand plummets down. Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad in Gutenberg! The Musical! Matt Murphy Bitten by the razzle-dazzle bug, our talentless twosome never looked back. (Like many of the gags, the name is the punch line a “wench” named Helvetica lusts after Gutenberg, for example.) One day on a crazy impulse, the guys sold Doug’s car to see a Broadway show-and ended up taking in three and a half (“Please don’t tell us how Hamilton ends, we will go back”). Crisscrossing the stage with big-boy steps like six-year-olds in a Nativity play, the anxious co-creators introduce themselves as proud residents of Nutley, New Jersey. Framed as a backer’s audition for a plainly atrocious tuner about the 16 th -century German inventor of the printing press, the real drama of Scott Brown and Anthony King’s supersized skit is the fraught bromance between its clueless makers, book writer Doug Simon (Andrew Rannells) and composer Bud Davenport (Josh Gad).
