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Review: ‘Head Over Heels’ can’t find the beat

Summer is not officially the silly season on Broadway, but you might be forgiven for assuming so should you wander into the Hudson Theatre, where “Head Over Heels,” a fearlessly loopy new jukebox musical drawing on the back catalog of the Go-Go’s, has taken up residence.

Taylor Iman Jones and the company of 'Head Over Heels.' (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Summer is not officially the silly season on Broadway, but you might be forgiven for assuming so should you wander into the Hudson Theatre, where “Head Over Heels,” a fearlessly loopy new jukebox musical drawing on the back catalog of the Go-Go’s, has taken up residence. The musical features, among other woolly diversions, a shepherd who dresses in drag as an Amazon, a king tricked into committing adultery with his own queen (long story), a proud princess who discovers a Sapphic love for her servant, some singing sheep, and a Delphic oracle of nonbinary gender, addressed not as a “he” or a “she” but a “they.”

Why, you might well wonder, do kings and queens and Delphic oracles — all speaking in pseudo-Elizabethan language — suddenly descend into the far less formal lexicon of the late-20th-century pop song when the guitars start churning out the Go-Go’s riffs?

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