Small Ball
Broadway talents can't save PTC's co-production with the 76ers' Daryl Morey from plodding songs and low-energy staging
Small Ball
Book and Lyrics by Mickle Maher
Music by Merel van Dijk and Anthony Barilla
Directed by Taibi Magar & Tyler Dobrowsky
Commissioned and Co-Produced by Daryl Morey1
at Philadelphia Theatre Company through June 29
Not Recommended
Small Ball has the concept, feel, and often the level of polish of a fake show from a sketch comedy program with almost none of the zany energy of a sketch comedy show to keep it afloat or make the joke of a concept work. It rarely has energy at all. It is tonally inconsistent. Plodding underscoring infects many of the scenes with the tone of an NPR podcast (the composers Merel van Dijk and Anthony Barilla list This American Life among their other credits, and do not list other theater work). None of the actual songs are memorable, despite a two week workshop at PTC in December 2023 that focused on the music.
The plot revolves around a team of 6” tall basketball players on the island Lilliput from Gulliver's Travels, their 5’11” American star player coincidentally named Michael Jordan (Jordan Dobson). This is the full extent of the sophistication of the basketball references in Small Ball. A reporter sent to cover their three-game season serves as a kind of framing device. No basketball is ever played, shot, dribbled, nor passed on stage, despite the presence of two hoops: one normal size and one massive, hanging above the stage. Even when the diminutive members of the “Existers” finally make a shot and a 6’ inflatable basketball appears on stage, we don't get to see it move. The ball is set into place a while a curtain is down. Almost no action at all takes place on stage, as if writer Mickle Maher were doing an exercise in the classical unity of place, with everything happening off stage and reported back. Though it's a musical with songs like “Sex with Giants,” there's very little choreography or movement at all. The themes here demand exuberance and manic energy, but the songs often constrain or even drain these moments and the staging rarely attempts to compensate. Songs typically heighten emotions in plays and musicals, these dampen them.
The rare bright spots come when the performances match the absurdity of the material, most consistently from Adam Chanler-Berat as the “strange” assistant coach Pippin. The otherwise mostly sincere approaches to this material just don't work. There are no stakes, nothing matters, and Jordan Dobson in the lead role seems to have no energy or cares. Well, we don't care either. The show opens with Dobson and Rob Tucker, as the Lilliputian Emperor/head coach, sitting, with a slow, sad, pseudo-philosophical number about losing that goes on too long and, dirge-like, sets the tone for everything that follows. Someone sitting in a row in front of me walked out within the first ten minutes. Maybe it was five.
Daryl Morey, head of basketball operations for the 76ers and board member at PTC co-produces here and commissioned the musical, first developed in Houston where it premiered when he was with the Rockets. Morey’s composer/writer team is just mismatched, the words and the music don't play well together. My gut says Small Ball would fare better in a smaller, scrappier theater than the Suzanne Roberts, where some of its sins would be more easily forgiven. In a June 4 feature for The Inquirer, Morey told the paper’s 76ers reporter, “each time, we get closer to New York,” noting that Hadestown took a thirteen year path from concept to the Walter Kerr Theatre. Magar and Dobrowsky, for their part, seem to believe this absurd basketball show could bring together sports and theater audiences, perhaps like the 25-day Broadway run of Lysistrata Jones did.2
Given the level of talent here, both local and Broadway actors, and the previous workshop (the show did have prior productions, in Houston and Denver), I wonder if the co-directors just don't work that well together as a creative team (Magar and Dobrowsky are both accomplished directors, but only have one prior credit as co-directors. I have not seen any of their previous work), or if this is the result of directors’ misguided belief in the power of this material. Perhaps it's the influence of Morey, who was more “hands on” in previous versions but still present at some rehearsals. Magar is quoted as saying Morey gave an actor a “brilliant” note. Magar also told The Inquirer she was “rolling on the floor [in] laughter” at comic scenes in rehearsal, so if there's delusion about the material, it's at least shared. Their vision, whether muddled or clear, is much too serious and sincere for a very silly, stupid show. There's nothing wrong with doing something silly and stupid, but you have to know what the thing is. Here, only Chanler-Berat seems to know what show he's doing.
I wouldn’t normally include this credit here, but in this case I think it belongs
The ill-fated musical Lysistrata Jones transposes Aristophanes to a modern university with a perennially losing men’s basketball team, whose cheerleader-girlfriends decide to withhold sex until they start winning. Despite rave reviews from the major critics, the show closed after 34 previews and 30 performances.