A musical adaptation of two classic one-act plays, The Twelve Pound Look by J.M. Barrie and A Sunny Morning by the Quintero brothers, with a shared theme of lovers meeting by chance after many years apart.

Nobody is seeing this, in case you’ve ever felt like being in on a secret. It’s not one worth knowing. I got myself a still-available $30 online rush seat at 4:30 PM and ended up front and center, which may have been one of the less-desirable seats with butts in them, given the house was maybe at 25% of capacity. Feeling bad for the performers, which include, notably, the venerable Chip Zien.

I’m sure the flop has to do with a complete lack of advertising—I’m pretty plugged in and didn’t know it existed until I randomly bumped into it on TodayTix–but it could just as well be a word of mouth thing, because, unfortunately, Reunions is a slog. It’s an hour and forty-five minute single act stapling together musical adaptations of two plays from 1905 and 1910 and a couple songs’ further connective tissue on the shared themes. The vibe is old-timey. The book is dull. The music is rudimentary. There’s a scene in here where Chip does this extremely long and exaggerated sneeze, and it keeps going and going and going, shooting past the point of giggleworthiness into the “okay, guys, what are we doing here?” zone. There are cartoon sound effects throughout.

I did a little research and it turns out, unsurprisingly, that the production firm, Act Two Theatricals, is just a shell company for the lyricist and book writer Jeffrey Scharf to quietly fund his own show’s off-Broadway premiere. Most new works go through a development process for a reason. I’m sure that it was very gratifying and hope it wasn’t too expensive for him to see the guy from Into the Woods in his show. Please stop making the 78-year-old man move furniture around for your entertainment.