Shire: Baby - The New musical

Baby is a musical with a book by Sybille Pearson, based on a story developed with Susan Yankowitz, music by David Shire, and lyrics by Richard Maltby Jr. It concerns the reactions of three couples each expecting a child. The musical first ran on Broadway from 1983 to 1984.

Frank Rich, theatre critic for The New York Times, wrote, "At a time when nearly every Broadway musical, good and bad, aims for the big kill with gargantuan pyrotechnics, here is a modestly scaled entertainment that woos us with such basic commodities as warm feelings, an exuberant cast and a lovely score. Perfect Baby is not, but it often makes up in buoyancy and charm what it lacks in forceful forward drive... Sybille Pearson has chosen her characters as if she were a pollster in search of a statistical cross-section of modern (and uniformly model) parents. Worse, this writer... values hit-and-miss one-liners over substance... Miss Pearson is also fond of such plot contrivances as mixed-up lab reports, and, in Act II, the story runs out altogether. The last trimester for the mothers in Baby is as much of a waiting game as it can be in real life. Yet David Shire, the composer, and Richard Maltby Jr., the lyricist, rush to the book's rescue by addressing the show's concerns with both humor and intelligence... To keep up with the varied ages of the characters, Mr. Shire writes with sophistication over a range that embraces rock, jazz and the best of Broadway schmaltz... Mr. Maltby's lyrics are not just smart and funny, but often ingenious." He concluded, "If the virtues of Baby can't override all its hitches, so be it. In achievement, this show is a throwback to the early 1960s - the last era when Broadway regularly produced some casual-spirited musicals that were not instantly categorizable as blockbusters or fiascos. Those musicals - like, say, Do Re Mi or 110 in the Shade - weren't built for the ages but could brighten a theater season or two: They were ingratiatingly professional, had both lulls and peaks, and inspired you to run to the record store as soon as the original cast album came out. So it is with Baby, and wouldn't it be cheering if such a show could find a home on the do-or-die Broadway of today?"