Described by Playbill as being "generally regarded" to be "one of the strangest shows ever to have graced a Broadway stage",[1] it told the story of a romance between a journalist with obsessive compulsive disorder and a singer-songwriter with Tourette's syndrome and later a brain tumor; as they fall in love, they are observed by an angel in Heaven who decides that their story would make a great "reality opera".

The story centers around two people: Jenny, who works at the Village Voice processing personal ads, and who has obsessive-compulsive disorder, and J.T., a singer-songwriter with Tourette's syndrome who also shouts the word "lemon" whenever he's happy.

As they meet and connect, they are observed from Heaven by an angel, Winston, who decides that their story would make a great "reality opera".

Starting prior to previews, two CD samplers of songs from the musical were printed to hand out to passersby in the Broadway theatre district of New York City.

[6][7] This approach was considered notable for a Broadway production, given the relative expense of printing CDs compared to simply handing out flyers to promote a show.

After the uniformly negative reviews, the production began an ad campaign reported to cost at least $1.5 million; said Nancy Coyne, head of the show's marketing, "They decided to take the budget allocated for the next six months and spend it on the next six weeks".

At one point, the campaign featured New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley's description of the show's "jaw-dropping moments of whimsy run amok" as a pull-quote.

[8] However, the campaign was ineffective, even with the show's weekly running cost of $320,000, which, according to the New York Times, "is very low by Broadway musical standards.

descends to dominate the stage in the final song, the suspicious arises that this might be an elaborate joke, like Bialystock and Bloom's insurance scam to hatch a surefire flop in The Producers", but that "no such trickery seems intended", and that "[the show] remains unswervingly earnest, even as it lurches unintentionally into parody.

[12] Terry Teachout of The Wall Street Journal compared the show to "Springtime for Hitler", the fictional musical from the Mel Brooks film The Producers that ended up being "so unintentionally funny that it becomes a smash hit."

[14] Ben Brantley of The New York Times wrote that, while the show was supposedly "madly eccentric and surreal", the result in reality was "a musical Hallmark card" whose "careering story line," while on the surface "[making the show] sound like a grotesque folie de grandeur", was "merely an excuse to deliver inspirational messages that are commonly found on television movies of the week and to trot out one sticky boy-band-style ballad after another."

He concluded with, "In My Life brings to mind that annoying breed of people who never stop talking about their quirks [...] because they are so afraid of being found out as the squares they truly are.

However, he also praised much of Brooks's score as "attractive", with orchestrations and musical direction that "make them sound great", and the relationship between Jenny and J.T.