Jimmy Buffett musical brings out the inner puritan for the critics | Mulshine

Upon waking up on Monday to yet another spring snowstorm, I found my thoughts wandering to warmer climes.

I could fire up the VW wagon, load some surfboards on top and head off to Mexico. It wouldn't be the first time. Or the second. Or even the third.

On one such trip in my youth, I got a Jimmy Buffett tape from some Florida surfers. I listened to it as I drove south to places like Guatemala and El Salvador, where I met plenty of Americans living the sort of life he writes about.

There was even a guy who labeled himself a "remittance man" years before Buffett made that term into the title of a song, It's about an American expatriate in the tropics of which it is said there are two types: the wanted and the unwanted.

Now that sounds like fun. But since I have both a mortgage and a car loan, I'll have to skip the trip south.

Over the weekend I did the next best thing. I traveled to Manhattan to see the musical based on Jimmy Buffett's songs titled "Escape to Margaritaville."

Meeting me there was Joe Roberts, the former speaker of the New Jersey Assembly. He's a liberal with whom I, a conservative, never discuss politics but often discuss Buffett.

On that topic we agree that Buffett tends to outrage both the politically correct left and the religious right. In both cases, the reason is America's latent Puritanism.

Roberts, who used to represent Camden, holds a huge Parrothead party every year when Buffett plays there.

The pre-concert tailgating is legendary. That can't be replicated in midtown Manhattan of course, and Roberts predicted before the show that it would be a poor fit for Broadway.

After the play, I asked him for his verdict:

"This will sound terrible, but it exceeds my expectations," he responded.

His expectations were low because he had read many negative reviews, Roberts said.

The play is of a type known as a "jukebox musical" in the style of "Jersey Boys" or "Beautiful," the Carole King story. The idea is to stitch together a plot incorporating the writer's hit songs.

In this case the plot revolves around a Buffett-like singer who entertains at a run-down hotel on a tropical island.

A beautiful environmental scientist shows up with her best friend, who is about to get married and is having a last fling before getting married. Her fiance is a lout who puts her on a strict pre-wedding diet that she drops in favor of a diet of cheeseburgers and margaritas.

All turns out well in the end, after lots of singing and dancing in the Broadway tradition. Yet for some reason the critics felt obligated to slam the show. The Washington Post critic termed it a "lamely antiseptic musical" and an "insufferably dumb show."

Then there was New York Times critic Jesse Green, who offered this plot synopsis concerning the hero and heroine:

"His profound challenge to Rachel is to decide whether she can let down her scientific hair long enough to crawl into a cabana for five days of casual sex with him."

Her scientific hair? It's one thing to put booze in the blender. But words? That's as badly mixed a metaphor as I've read.

There's a reason Buffett is one of the few writers to reach No. 1 on both the New York Times fiction and non-fiction best-seller lists. The reason is that he takes care in fashioning his images.

Green writes of the "horndog smarm" of such songs as "Why Don't We Get Drunk (and Screw)?"

This guy needs to get out more. Imagine if he ever heard Brigitte Bardot's "Je t'aime, Moi Non Plus," a song about which it was said  that Bardot and the song's author did during the recording what Buffett merely suggested. (And which contains the memorable lyric "Je vais et je viens, entre tes reins" - which I won't be translating for a family newspaper.)

When the French write about that sort of thing, they're being sophisticated. When Buffett writes about it, he's being smarmy.

In fact Buffett incorporates more French and Spanish into his writing than any songwriter I can think of.  He's multicultural in the best sense of the word.

As for all that drinking and carrying on, he's no different from one of the other guys who made both best-seller lists. Ernest Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast" was "Hemingway at his best," said the Times critic of that era.

True enough. But at his best he was doing the same thing Buffett writes about: traveling around exotic places getting drunk with interesting people.

For some, that's an inexcusable sort of escapism.

But I suspect that's because they haven't got the nerve to escape.

ADD: The fallacy endorsed by these critics is the idea that the life of the average American represents "reality." The author/sailor Robert Pirsig debunked that idea in this brilliant essay on people who try long-distance sailing and are discouraged:

"As best I can make out, reality for them is the mode of daily living they followed before taking to the water; unlike cruise sailing, it is the one shared by the majority of the members of our culture. It usually means gainful employment in a stable economic network of some sort without too much variance from what are considered the norms and mores of society. In other words, back to the common herd.

"The illogic is not hard to find. The house-car-job complex with its nine-to-five office routine is common only to a very small percentage of the earth's population and has only been common to this percentage for the last hundred years or so. If this is reality, have the millions of years that preceded our current century all been unreal?

"An alternative - and better - definition of reality can be found by naming some of its components ...air...sunlight...wind...water...the motion of waves...the patterns of clouds before a coming storm. These elements, unlike twentieth-century office routines, have been here since before life appeared on this planet and they will continue long after office routines are gone. They are understood by everyone, not just a small segment of a highly advanced society. When considered on purely logical grounds, they are more real than the extremely transitory life-styles of the modern civilization the depressed ones want to return to."

COMMENTS: It was the great H.L. Mencken who described puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere might be happy." Please read his essay "Criticism of Criticism of Criticism" before commenting.

ALSO: Those reviewers may not get it, but  Bob Dylan ranks Jimmy Buffett among his favorite songwriters.

If you purchase a product or register for an account through a link on our site, we may receive compensation. By using this site, you consent to our User Agreement and agree that your clicks, interactions, and personal information may be collected, recorded, and/or stored by us and social media and other third-party partners in accordance with our Privacy Policy.