They're Playing Our Song

Rating: 6/10 (16 February 2007)

It's a good twenty years since the Musical They'r Playing Our Song was produced on Broadway so most of the target audience for Music and Lyrics are unlikely to know it but Writer-Director Marc Lawrence would have been in his mid-twenties at the time and may well have seen the Show, a lightly-disguised story of the working and personal relationship between composer Marvin Hamlish and lyricist Careole Bayer Sager, kept it in the back of his mind until now and re-launched it as Music and Lyrics. They're Playing Our Song had a Book by Neil Simon, a tough act to follow and Lawreence's script doesn't even get close. On the other hand his two leads, Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore, know how to react when someone calls 'Action' so we wind up with a pleasant feel-good movie that's more than adequate if you only want to spend an hour or so being mildly amused. There are, of course, lots of movies like this around, films you don't mind seeing once and forget as you leave the theatre and this is no better or worse than most of them.