‘Girls5Eva’: One-hit girl band is a comedy hit – Newsday

WHAT IT’S ABOUT Girls5Eva (pronounced Girls-Five-Evah) is a girl band from the late ’90s that had one hit and then … well, then each member had to get a real job. Dawn (Sara Bareilles) now runs a restaurant, Gloria (Paula Pell) is a dental surgeon, Wickie (Renée Elise Goldsberry) is a would-be entrepreneur and Summer (Busy Philipps) is a stay-at-home mom. The fifth member of the band, Ashley (Ashley Park), appears to have met with an unfortunate accident in the intervening years.

Meanwhile, hot young rap star, Lil Stinker (Jeremiah Craft) has decided to sample their one-and-only hit, “Fame5Eva.” With the residual checks rolling in — or sort of rolling in — their manager, Larry (Jonathan Hadary), wonders if they might think about reviving the group.

This is the first streaming series from Tina Fey and Robert Carlock (“30 Rock”).

MY SAY Broadway has been down the last year, but that doesn’t mean all of its performers have been out. “Girls5Eva” seems to have made certain of that: Besides Bareilles (“Waitress”), Goldsberry (“Hamilton”) and Park (“Mean Girls”), the other Broadway stars onboard include Daniel Breaker (also “Hamilton”) and Andrew Rannells (“The Book of Mormon”). There are also a few TV veterans (Philipps, Hadary, Pell, formerly of “SNL”) and even a “30 Rock” semi-regular (Dean Winters).

That’s a lot of star power, but then “Girls5Eva” is a lot of show. It’s packed with the kind of writing that Carlock, Fey and showrunner Meredith Scardino mastered first at “30 Rock” then “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.” It’s also the kind of writing that demands skillful performers, lest they tumble over the tangled sentences and fall, face-first, into a vat of boiling verbs. No one stumbles into that vat here.

You know well the kind of writing, or at least “Rock” and “Kimmy” fans do: Lots of double-entendres, puns, quips, zingers and zappers, each line a checklist of pop-culture references. They fly by and if you miss the meaning of one, it’s already too late because it’s on to the next. Skillful pace and timing can at least prompt an audience to laugh even if that audience doesn’t always know what it’s laughing at.

And that’s “Girls5Eva,” too. This often is a funny show, built on the same basic premise as “30 Rock” — that fame is fleeting or, at minimum, uncertain. Stars like Bareilles and Goldsberry know that better than anyone, too, and don’t have to look any further than a catastrophic 2020 for proof.

In a sense, that’s the unspoken subtext of “Girls5Eva,” too. Nobody knows anything, especially in show business. A Broadway star one year, an out of work one the next — or a one-hit girl band in one decade, an obscure “Jeopardy!” clue the next. Of course, was a really hard year for everyone, but at least “Girls5Eva” — however modestly — helps to forget it.

BOTTOM LINE Funny and sharp, with some welcome (also inescapable) inflections of “30 Rock.”