[1] The musical focuses on Baltimore teenager Allison Vernon-Williams, who is drawn across the tracks from her 1954 finishing-school background into a relationship with the orphaned Wade "Cry-Baby" Walker, the leader of a pack of rebel outcasts.

Terry Teachout, in The Wall Street Journal, wrote that the musical "is campy, cynical, totally insincere and fabulously well crafted.

"[10] Similarly, Newsday offered that the musical is "pleasantly demented and - deep in the sweet darkness of its loopy heart - more true to the cheerful subversion of a John Waters movie than its sentimental big sister Hairspray.

This show in search of an identity has all the saliva-stirring properties of week-old pre-chewed gum.... Mr. Ashford brings his customary gymnastic vigor to the choreography: lots of revved-up jumping jacks, push-ups and leg lifts, usually led by a trio of athletic muscle boys.

"[13] The New York Sun opined that O'Donnell and Meehan "had far more success with another retro-themed Waters adaptation, Hairspray.... Cry-Baby is content to stay in the shallow end and focus on a standard wrong-side-of-the-tracks tale....

"[14] USA Today wrote "The rockabilly-inspired numbers that David Javerbaum and Adam Schlesinger have crafted for Cry-Baby aren't as ambitious or infectious [as Hairspray], but the show is similarly good-hearted, and has more of a Waters edge.

Javerbaum and Schlesinger's lyrics and Mark O'Donnell and Thomas Meehan's book are both more inventively crass and less snarky than those of other contemporary musical winkfests; you get the sense that these writers share Waters' affection for his goofy subjects.