One of the biggest musicals of the season, "Rocky", based on Sylvester Stallone's Oscar-winning film, opened yesterday, March 13, at the Winter Garden Theater. Andy Karl stars as the shlubby boxer who, through heart and grit, builds himself up to a title fight. Margo Seibert is Adrian, the girl in his corner, while Dakin Mathews is the cornerman in his corner.

With a book by Thomas Meehan and score by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens (of "Ragtime" renown), "Rocky" premiered in Germany two years ago and now seems ready for prime time. Early buzz, while mixed, had been especially good for the climactic battle in the ring, but how did the New York critics react now that the show has officially come out swinging? Did they score it a knockout, a draw or a dive?

NBC New York’s Robert Kahn sides with the crowd in that the “electric final 15 minutes” are “game-changing. Jaw-dropping. Astounding.” The previous two hours, however, constitute “an otherwise-workaday musical buoyed by enough built-in goodwill to lift it up the stairs of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and beyond.” Kahn also praises Andy Karl (“he sings and does chin-ups at the same time”), director Alex Timbers and choreographer Steven Hoggett. Though he finds the score “serviceable if humdrum”, he comes back to those last 15 minutes that are “unlike anything you’ve seen in the theater.”

Newsday’s Linda Winer is also sold on that final sequence but complains that the rest of this “earnest” show lacks sufficient conflict. She wishes that both Adrian (Margo Seibert), brother Paulie (Danny Mastrogiorgio) and manager Mickey (Dakin Matthews) didn’t transition so quickly from being prickly pears to supportive sides. That said, she goes all fangirl for Andy Karl, the show’s “sweet center” who comes off as “an exceptionally hunky kitten.” Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens’ “generic soft-pop ballads” aren’t nearly as welcome as the movie songs brought into the show (e.g., “Eye of the Tiger” and “Gonna Fly Now”), which, for her, ultimately “runs in place.”

Scoring the show with a “B”, Entertainment Weekly’s Thom Geier calls the production “a technical knockout” thanks to the “spectacular final fight” that is “viscerally realistic.” He’s also pleasantly surprised that Timbers’ staging tries to maintain “the indie spirit” of the film. “At times, the show plays less like a splashy Broadway musical than a Clifford Odets revival” – which is probably meant as a compliment. However, “too many of Flaherty’s songs play like missed opportunities…[where] clunky rhymes such as shoddy/body are no help.”

Writing for AM New York, Matt Windman musters only a star and a half for “Rocky”, noting that the movie’s delicate love story about working-class loners is here “overwhelmed by towering walls, shifting platforms, multimedia screens and heavy lighting.” As with the other critics, Windman has little good to say about the score, which is “musically weak and unintentionally ridiculous,” or even the book and its “hokey one-liners.” Yes, Windman loves the big fight finale, but not enough to keep him from branding “Rocky” as “the new `Spider-Man’, a similarly flashy and misconceived spectacle-musical.”

Associated Press scribe Mark Kennedy is similarly underwhelmed, though he does like a few of the ballads in the score. He mocks Andy Karl for doing “a karaoke of [Sylvester] Stallone but lauds Margo Seibert: “watching her bloom and stand up for herself is a joy, and you long to hear her sing more.” “The final fight,” Kennedy continues, “[is] a spectacular piece of theater, to be sure,” but to include it, the show essentially stops being musical theater, “which begs the question why this material screamed out to be a musical in the first place… At this point, `Rocky’ is trying to be immersive. The cost is its soul.”

Peter Marks of the Washington Post won’t deny that “the last 15 minutes…send you out of the Winter Garden pumped,” and he has nice words for leads Karl and Seibert, but he’s tired of movies being slapped up into musicals, especially when, as in this one, the two best songs are the ones from the films. “The musical never speaks in its own, original voice,” Marks sighs. He also notes that by making Apollo Creed a bit nicer and less directly taunting than in the movie, “the bout is not so much between the two fighters as between Rocky and his low self-esteem.”

Elisabeth Vincentelli of the New York Post concurs with the general consensus that the final fight is magic; the rest of the show, not so much, though there are "sweet ballads" and lead Karl has "a cool-cat ease and a warm, evocative singing voice."

Writing for his own blog, fellow New York Post critic Frank Scheck agrees that the concluding fight is exciting and that "Christopher Barreco’s elaborate, endlessly shifting sets for this hugely expensive production are indeed awe-inspiring." Despite a "sluggish" first act and "uninspired" score, the show's "incredibly inventive staging" rescues the evening.