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!”