Two Musicals

Adam ChanlerBerat and Kyle Beltran  in “The Fortress of Solitude” at the Public.
Adam Chanler-Berat and Kyle Beltran (foreground, left and right) in “The Fortress of Solitude,” at the Public.Photograph courtesy Doug Hamilton / The Public Theatre

The director John Rando’s crap sentimentality undermines so much of what should be interesting about “On the Town” (now in revival, at the Lyric) that you spend at least half your time trying to shake off his various manipulations in an effort to finally enjoy something of the show. In the first moments of this strenuously “big” version of the musical, we see an American flag prominently displayed onstage. The production’s assured music director, James Moore, strikes up the band—actually a full, rich orchestra—and they launch into “The Star-Spangled Banner.” On the night I saw the musical, which opened on Broadway sixty years ago this year, the audience stood and pledged allegiance. Toward the end of it, the excellent and sexy Phillip Boykin, playing the first of a handful of workmen, joined in the singing as he walked down a center aisle. Dressed in dark trousers, boots, and suspenders, he was heading for work at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

As designed, badly, by Beowulf Boritt, the somewhat Art Deco set has nothing to do with the nineteen-forties and the Second World War era that Adolph Green and Betty Comden evoked in their book and lyrics. (Jason Lyons’s lighting design doesn’t work in tandem with Boritt’s set so much as bounce around it.) Still, there is Boykin’s bottomless-sounding baritone, and that music, and those lyrics, as he sings “I Feel Like I’m Not Out of Bed Yet.” It’s six in the morning, and the world is just about to become more alive. A big ship docks, and three sailors flit, glide, and run down the gangplank. Their names are Gabey, Chip, and Ozzie (Tony Yazbeck, Jay Armstrong Johnson, and Clyde Alves, respectively). The sailors are on shore leave for all of twenty-four hours, and they want to fit all of life into them. This is their first visit to the city, and like any number of recent arrivals they’re hungry for their version of the arrival myth. Inevitably, this will include some girls, but at first the boys are flexing for one another. Based on an idea supplied by the choreographer Jerome Robbins, “On the Town” is, to some degree, the musical version of Robbins’s 1944 ballet, “Fancy Free,” about which the brilliant dance critic Edwin Denby wrote:

It’s sentiment of how people live in this country is completely intelligent and completely realistic. Its pantomime and its dances are witty, exuberant, and at every moment they feel natural. It is a direct, manly piece.… The whole number is as sound as a superb vaudeville turn; in ballet terminology it is perfect American character ballet.

The problem with many American musicals is that the men and women who direct them—certainly the least visionary among them—think that characters are synonymous with caricatures. Rando never misses an opportunity to make any situation more boldfaced, because to encourage complexity and nuance would mean a different level of commitment toward the work. He’s not interested in mining the heart of Comden and Green’s periodically clunky script; he leaves their lyrics and Leonard Bernstein’s high and bright and wistful score alone. (Bernstein wrote the music for “Fancy Free,” too.)

The show’s clever collaborators were not yet thirty when “On the Town” premièred on Broadway. As with “Oklahoma!” before it, the play’s dance and music are part of the story. Often the piece has been called a fantasy version of life in New York, but I think what informs it, really, is commercial excitement—the creators’ sense of their own talent and what they could achieve together. And yet the musical’s more compelling moments come when it pauses, amid all of that anxious striving—anxiety is not always a bad thing, and can often drive artists to make good work—to light on the loneliness one can feel in New York, or in any city. Gabey can’t find Ivy (a too doll-like Megan Fairchild); he’s fallen in love with her poster—she was voted Miss Turnstiles, and even without knowing her Gabey knows that she’s the girl for him. Meanwhile, his buddies have partnered up with a lady cab driver named Hildy (Alysha Umphress) and an anthropologist named Claire (the talented Elizabeth Stanley, who, along with Yazbeck, is the best player here), which only exacerbates Gabey’s isolation. Standing near the pier, he sings “Lonely Town,” a perfect—and perfectly evocative—ballad, one that means so much more nearly twenty-five years after Bernstein’s death: you can feel his queer loneliness in it. Heard in 2014, “Lonely Town” feels like a song about the alienation inherent in cruising and going home alone, or with the wrong person.

In 1998, George C. Wolfe directed a version of “On the Town” that I found more than interesting for a number of reasons, largely because he treated the piece as a kind of rite of passage. At the end of the show, when the couples parted—the sailors’ leave was over—they did so with heavy hearts and something like self-knowledge. Unlike Wolfe, Rando prefers to dish out his actors sunny side up. Most disturbing is his treatment of his actresses; their characters are not characters so much as archetypes. Ivy is a baby-woman; Hildy is a big-boned bully who will make love happen, no matter the cost. Stanley fights against being characterized as a neurotic ditz; her imagination is bigger than Rando’s, as is Jackie Hoffman’s. As Madame Dilly, Hoffman, a comedic actress invested in kvetch, walks away with her scenes. She knows that musicals, though make-believe, are best believed when the sentimentality is minimized and the action happens with a knowing wink.

“The Fortress of Solitude” (at the Public), which is based on Jonathan Lethem’s panoramic 2003 novel, has two good things about it: the actors Adam Chanler-Berat and André De Shields. Without them, the show would be a complete mess and a waste of your time, given all the indignities that you have to suffer in order to spend time with those two charmers. Chanler-Berat plays Dylan Ebdus, a young kid growing up in nineteen-seventies Brooklyn. Dylan is a loner, but not by choice: his mother, Rachel (Kristen Sieh) has taken off to Northern California to find herself; his father does the best he can. He’s a white boy in a largely black and Hispanic neighborhood; his difference sets him apart.

Within that community, though, he meets and is befriended by Mingus Rude (Kyle Beltran), who is as imaginative as Dylan. Together, they start “tagging”—that is, graffitiing—and find a magic ring that unites them and allows them to transcend the limits of their fractured families. (Mingus’s father is abusive, just as his father, Senior, played by De Shields with the physical ease and certainty of a snake charmer, was abusive toward him.) Beltran is especially fine when he conveys just how rattled by hatred Mingus is, but he doesn’t really connect with Chanler-Berat; he’s in some other show altogether. That’s not really his fault. The director, Daniel Aukin, seems to feel as though he’s overseeing three or four shows simultaneously, but this urban circus doesn’t cohere, because the book, by Itamar Moses, has no real through line that’s clear, and Michael Friedman, the composer behind some of the best musicals of the past decade—“Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” and “Love’s Labour’s Lost”—doesn’t have a script to work with.

In fact, Aukin’s direction is the opposite of Rando’s: he’s trying to bring depth to the American musical—a very worthy task—but forgets the sequins. It’s as if the hugeness of Lethem’s novel sent his interpreters in so many directions at once that they could never find their way back to making a piece about New York, and about how innocence gets spoiled by elders, who resent you for having what they can’t remember ever having themselves.