If you want your ears and eyes to bleed, you can watch this lame-brained idea on youtube. The songs are neither catchy nor memorable. Want to know how bad it is? The whole show is free on youtube, that's how bad it is.

Certainly it's great that the stage musical version of the animated movie got a live filming straight from the Broadway Theater, and there's a lot right with it, that being the hard working cast lead by Brian D'Arcy James, Sutton Foster and Christopher Sieber who are all fantastic. But it's still standard stage spectacular, all style and no substance, and perhaps a Broadway show that would require a lot of re-writing for a more sensitive era.

The score is upbeat but not memorable, with only a few songs that I'd think of humming on my way out of the theater. There have been other musicals based on classic fairy tales, and while this may not have the adult wit and life lessons of "Into the Woods" or the timeless appeal of the TV "Cinderella", if it gets families with youngsters into the theater, then it's achieved something. But a lot of the cultural references will go way over their heads, and a few gags are a bit adult in nature.

For the serious theater goer, it may indeed be an eye roller in spite of the fact that Foster is a great quirky heroine and Sieber is a terrific villain. But the gas and burb jokes are a bit much after a while, and when you have to make a musical number surrounding that in a way that Mel Brooks probably found too much, it's a sign of desperation. Great production design does add a few points in my view, and there are a few crowd pleasing moments, but this is a "Spamalot" rip-off that needed a lot of fat removed.

I'm sure this is a fun musical for some people but the only thing that got through this was Sutton Foster and figuring out how lord farquaads legs work. The 4 stars are for Sutton Foster.