GOOD PRESS

Gutenberg! a musical about the inventor of the printing press might just be the unlikeliest thing to hit Broadway in years, and also the most delightful. Marley Marius meets its champions.

- 

On a warm Wednesday morning in Manhattan’s South Street Seaport, as a throng of little girls and their mothers swells outside a Barbie-themed restaurant pop-up serving rainbow-sprinkle pancakes, another group has gathered in the service of very different IP.

Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells are inspecting the letterpress at Bowne & Co. Stationers, inside the South Street Seaport Museum, where resident printers still operate machines from the 19th and early 20th centuries. (Bowne & Co. itself dates back to 1775.) This month, more than a decade after starring in The Book of Mormon, the Tony-nominated actors return to Broadway in Gutenberg! The Musical!, written by Scott Brown and Anthony King. The show centers on Bud (Gad) and Doug (Rannells), two friends staging a frantic run-through of their musical about—you guessed it!—Johannes Gutenberg, inventor of the movable-type printing press. A special kind of comic chaos ensues.

“Why don’t we do the show here?” Gad asks, poking around Bowne & Co.’s charming store front, where paper gifts and tote bags live alongside ancient printing paraphernalia. “We’d sell 10 tickets,” Rannells quips in response. “We’d be sold out!”

Banter like this—and the odd belted lyric from Sweeney Todd—continues throughout the morning, as the two gamely change setups and juggle the props that will be used for their