Yeah, I don't so much believe in honoring the preview period.

1. Author is functionally illiterate.
2. Author has submitted some variety of literature we don't publish: poetry, religious revelation, political rant, illustrated fanfic, etc.
3. Author has a serious neurochemical disorder, puts all important words into capital letters, and would type out to the margins if MSWord would let him.
4. Author is on bad terms with the Muse of Language. Parts of speech are not what they should be. Confusion-of-motion problems inadvertently generate hideous images. Words are supplanted by their similar-sounding cousins: towed the line, deep-seeded, dire straights, nearly penultimate, incentiary, reeking havoc, hare's breath escape, plaintiff melody, viscous/vicious, causal/casual, clamoured to her feet, a shutter went through her body, his body went ridged, empirical storm troopers, ex-patriot Englishmen, et cetera.
5. Author can write basic sentences, but not string them together in any way that adds up to paragraphs.
6. Author has a moderate neurochemical disorder and can't tell when he or she has changed the subject. This greatly facilitates composition, but is hard on comprehension.
7. Author can write passable paragraphs, and has a sufficiently functional plot that readers would notice if you shuffled the chapters into a different order. However, the story and the manner of its telling are alike hackneyed, dull, and pointless.

(At this point, you have eliminated 60-75% of your submissions. Almost all the reading-and-thinking time will be spent on the remaining fraction.)

8. It's nice that the author is working on his/her problems, but the process would be better served by seeing a shrink than by writing novels.
9. Nobody but the author is ever going to care about this dull, flaccid, underperforming book.
10. The book has an engaging plot. Trouble is, it's not the author's, and everybody's already seen that movie/read that book/collected that comic.

(You have now eliminated 95-99% of the submissions.)

11. Someone could publish this book, but we don't see why it should be us.
12. Author is talented, but has written the wrong book.
13. It's a good book, but the house isn't going to get behind it, so if you buy it, it'll just get lost in the shuffle.
14. Buy this book.

It occurs to me that the public sees a great deal more of the slush pile when it comes to theatre than fiction. We see plenty of (13)s, like the clever but doomed [title of show]. We see a number of (12)s--one that comes to mind is Jane Eyre, a competently executed show for which the authors composed three or four sensational songs but which just wasn't appropriate source material in the end. We see the odd (11), like Curtains, which there's nothing really wrong with except that it never quite reaches the heights that make one like it.

And now there is A Tale of Two Cities, which can generously be called a (9) and less generously a (7).

That wasn't the lede I started with for this review, btw. My first draft was "If Corky St. Clair had tried to adapt Les Miserables but failed to get the rights, he might have written this."

Another tack I tried: "If I were Ben Brantley, I'd spend the first paragraph of my NYT review excoriating the state of the Broadway marketplace for forcing him to type the following sentence: 'Jill Santoriello has no business writing musicals.'"

(I've probably made my point without actually getting into a review, but I'll go on a little bit longer.)

Someone should have stopped Santoriello. I don't wish her ill; not everybody can write a musical singlehandedly and shepherd it to Broadway, and I give her kudos for that. But it's astonishing that no one sat her down along the way and said "This has to stop. Your work is not of professional caliber." Unfortunately, the prime candidate for doing so would be the producer. Her husband.

Let's run down the problems with A Tale of Two Cities:

*The novel is a poor choice for musicalization, too complex by half. Seasoned writers would struggle with it (or, more likely, never attempt it).

*The distinctive voice of Dickens is almost completely absent. In book and lyrics, we instead get the voice of Santoriello, who struggles with period speech and consistently fails to differentiate the characters. The humor is sub-sitcom. The revolutionary subplot and the love triangle are not what the show should be about.

*As a composer, Santoriello belongs to that "let's string together incompatible phrases like charms on a bracelet" school that dominates at NYMF and Fringe but usually doesn't get further than off-Broadway. There's no structure to these songs; they just run on at length until the singer gets a money note. One longs for the relative musical genius of Frank Wildhorn, who at least knows how to build toward that note.

*The apery of Les Miserables is jaw-dropping. Many of the similarities are built into the novels themselves (a similar setting and some comparable characters), but that kind of makes the situation worse: you'd never mistake one novel for the other. The first act actually ends with a group number in which everyone sings about what's going to happen tomorrow, and holy shit, did they think they were going to get away with that? (Especially when the quodlibet form is utterly beyond Santoriello's abilities.)

*Related to the above: I know this musical has been in development for a long time, but where has Santoriello been for the last twenty years? When's the last time a pop opera succeeded? Is she so out of touch with current trends that she thinks eighties shows will sell?

*There are just all sorts of basic errors that would be fixed through professional collaboration. When we learn that Carton is in love with Lucie, they have not yet exchanged any dialogue and he hasn't even given her a meaningful look. He has at least three ballads about being in love with her in the first act, with nothing to break them up and help give the piece color. And what's the deal with the title of the show being flashed on a scrim after the first song, as though this were a movie?

All right, that's out of my system. The production is by and large professional and of high quality--decent costumes, imaginative lighting, competent staging. If the set's unnecessarily complicated, I can't particularly blame them--this particular pig needs all the lipstick it can get. And what a cast--no one can quite bring these lame stock characters to life, but it's good to have people like Gregg Edelman and Aaron Lazar to try. (James Barbour was the audience favorite, statutory rape convictions notwithstanding. Too bad they didn't have the sense not to give him scenes opposite a little girl.)

Still, this is a Musical Theatre 101 project, and it gets an F. If it makes it to opening night, the reviews are going to be unbelievably brutal.