Tomorrow Morning

In the decidedly uninteresting new musical Tomorrow Morning, now being presented at the York Theatre Company, two couples are facing diametrically different dawns. Kat (Autumn Hulbert) and Jack (Matthew Hydzik) are a bride and groom on the nerve-wracking night before their marital plunge, whereas Catherine (Mary Mossberg) and John (D.B. Bonds) are about to sign the divorce papers after 10 years of less-than-wedded bliss.

The faintly intriguing gimmick driving composer-lyricist-librettist Laurence Mark Wythe’s 75-minute enterprise is that cooing Kat and Jack and contentious Catherine and John are actually the same couple. Therefore, the audience is invited to observe how an in-love pair come to be so out-of-love over an intervening decade — ground that has already been covered in many other better musicals (including Jason Robert Brown’s The Last 5 Years.)

We do get some clues to the couple’s undoing, such as Kat’s failure to tell Jack until hours before their union that she’s already pregnant and John’s extra-marital affair, about which Catherine learns. But as both couples bicker in dialogue and song — often observed by their previous or eventual selves — little more than dim hints emerge to give the destructive problems a necessary underpinning.

Yes, there is also talk about Adam, the unseen son who was the result of the hastily-revealed pregnancy, but aside from Catherine’s plan to remove the boy from Los Angeles to New York City as a result of her publishing-editor’s transfer, not much is known of him until (too) late in the proceedings.

Moreover, much of what the foursome say to each other is trite and what they sing to each other and to themselves is even triter, as particularly evidenced in a final song called “All About Today” that espouses the gee-whiz belief that what matters as we look towards our tomorrow mornings is, well, today. Only in the two numbers, Jack and John’s “Look What We Made” about fatherhood and Catherine’s Joni Mitchell-like “Self-Portrait,” does Wythe offer evidence that he has genuine songwriting abilities.

While singing and speaking their lines, Bonds, Hurlbert, Hydzik, and Mossberg all prove their vocal and acting worth, and they also give everything they’ve got to Lorin Latarro’s mostly mechanical choreography. But they can’t save Tomorrow Morning from feeling like yesterday’s news.