Original Broadway Cast, 2014 (Universal Music Enterprises) (2 / 5) The overture of Jason Robert Brown’s Honeymoon in Vegas tells us everything we need to know about the score: It’s full of showbiz razzmatazz, easy on the ears, yet overstuffed and largely generic. The opening number, “I Love Betsy,” is a list song that would’ve made Cole Porter proud, and has rightly become a beloved musical theater standard, but the score doesn’t have much farther to go. Given that the show’s story is deeply silly and farcical, the characters don’t have a lot to sing about, and Brown consistently stretches each emotion and musical moment to its fullest extent. As a result, even songs with clever ideas behind them, such as “Out of the Sun” (an ode to a wife who died from over-tanning) and “Airport Song” (a comic sequence about the difficulties of finding a flight) wear out their welcome. Although the snazzy, Vegas-style orchestrations by Don Sebesky serve the period nicely, they don’t do anything to help the sameness of the songs, especially when it comes to big group numbers. The show’s stars, Rob McClure and Brynn O’Malley, are charming, but neither of them are quite magnetic enough to sustain the piece as it starts to lag. Tony Danza is perfectly cast in the role of professional gambler Tommy Korman, and while he’s not a natural singer, he does have some great moments — one of them comes towards the end of the show, with “A Little Luck.” Featured performers including Nancy Opel and David Josefsberg do their best to sell their material, but there’s only so much you can do with tropes as tired as overbearing mothers and Elvis impersonators. Honeymoon in Vegas, true to its subject matter, may provide a nice vacation from the troubles of daily life, but since several other musical comedies exist that are far more intelligent about their silliness (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Drowsy Chaperone, et al.), one couldn’t be blamed for deciding not to take this trip. — Charles Kirsch