Well, they’ve dared and thanks, beasts. Actually, there’s only one real bimbo in “H2$” and she’s the smartest girl at World Wide Wicket, the corporate giant. As played by Luba Mason, Hedy La Rue lives up to her name-a heady gal from the street. Hedy’s five-inch heels clatter more smartly than her typing fingers, but she uses those fingers to wind her besotted boss, J. B. Biggley (Ronn Carroll) around. While he’s being wound, Biggley is being conned by the antihero, J. Pierrepont Finch (Matthew Broderick). Finch is a young window washer who comes off his scaffold armed with the show’s eponymous how-to book.
Finch’s devious rise through the corridors of power is like a Jules Feiffer cartoon come to life, and McAnuff drives the whole show with Looney Tunes velocity, including climactic eruptions from Wayne Cilento’s Fosseish choreography. Three decades haven’t dimmed the sardonic wit of the book by Abe Burrows. Loesser’s score is less musically resplendent than “Guys” and “Fella,” but it’s masterfully integrated with Burrows’s book. “I Believe in You” is still the ultimate hymn of self-adoration, sung by Finch to his mirror image in the executive washroom.
As Finch, Broderick is not the comic-strip Nijinsky that Robert Morse was in 1961. But he’s hilariously insidious as he connives his way from the mailroom to the boardroom, and he sings with a full-throated, impudent charm. The whole cast swarms with ant-hill energy in John Arnone’s IBM/Mondrian set, with kinetic projections that are an animated anthology of skyscraper New York. Ks Finch’s girl, Megan Mullally provides a sweetly ironic rationale for female subservience. In our current anti-Rodham mood, that still sounds like how to succeed.
