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In sixty-some years of theatre-going on and off Broadway, and even WAY off Broadway, I have seldom left a play or a piece of musical theatre in the middle of the show.
Years ago John and I walked out in the middle of Les Miz in Boston, which was driving us crazy, and tonight David and I left Celebrating the Music of William Finn at the intermission at Barrington Stage. In both cases we were tired of being assaulted by endless noise and pathetic lyrics. Had I seen Mr. Finn's Romance in Hard Times, which I reviewed last week, before buying the tickets for tonight's show, I would have skipped it. Too late. I bought the tickets before we saw Romance.
Tonight's excerpts from his various shows, two of which earned Tony Awards, was simply more of the same. Mr. Finn seems to like loud, shrill voices, who then are amplified to the point of pain, singing his autobiographical lyrics, which are not that interesting to begin with, or that well set to music.
I'm sorry to have to carp about these points, but suffice it to say this is the last musical of his I plan to suffer through.
To make matters worse, our dinner tonight at Spice Dragon, which is usually quite good, was a mess. It turns out that they are closing tomorrow night while the upstairs of the building is being reconstructed and they were out of various menu items as well as our favorite cocktail ingredients.
This was David's farewell outing before heading to Chicago next week.
Oh well....
I hope Victor Hugo gets royalties from Les Miz. If he stops rolling over in his grave, that is.
My late, dear friend, mentor, and boss at St.Paul's Chapel, Columbia years ago, Searle Wright, used to say: "Sing good! If you can't sing good, sing loud!!"
Well, tonight the cast of Romance in Hard Times at Barrington Stage 2 certainly sang loud!
The musical by William Finn with a book by Rachel Sheinkin was originally written and performed in 1989 at the Public Theatre in New York. It was one of Joseph Papp's Theatre Laboratory presentations and ran for three weeks.
The current production seems to be in the progress of being re-written by Mr. Finn. In fact, one of the characters is 'The Composer', who is re-writing the play as it goes along. We were told that the cast had learned 32 pages of new material today.
I'm afraid it needs more than thirty-two new pages to be a success. The almost non-existant plot concerns a woman who refuses to deliver the child she is pregnant with until there is a better future. Since this takes place in the depression of the thirties, it looks like it will be an elephantine pregnancy.
A number of out of work people gather in a soup kitchen and lament their fate. The father of the baby is mute and will not speak until he gets work. He finally gets sent to jail. He escapes. Eleanor Roosevelt appears in a tasteless parody of that fine lady to try to save the day.
Need I say more?
Well, I guess I have to. Mr. Finn seems to devise text that is un-settable and then attempts to set it to music. There is a lot of repetition of phrases. At several dramatic high points the musical monolog goes on for too long with no advancement of the already stalled plot. The end is just as gloomy as the beginning.
In case you haven't noticed by now, I didn't like the show.
The cast, David Benoit, Lance Fletke, Alan H. Green, Desmond Green, Matthew Gregory, Gabriel Kadian, Anne Kanengeiser, Theresa Kloos, Alix Korey (who we saw several weeks ago in a poor imitation of Ethel Merman), Andrea Leach, Michael Mandell, Jordana McMahon, Christina Acosta Robinson, Aaron Serotsky, and Ross Yoder all seem like talented actors with what could be good 'theatre' voices. But either the director or the composer must have told them to 'Give it all you've got!' Which they did.
Unfortunately.
