Author Topic: 'Tales of the City' (the Musical!) at A.C.T, San Francisco  (Read 3127 times)

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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'Tales of the City' (the Musical!) at A.C.T, San Francisco
« on: June 18, 2011, 05:20:02 pm »



http://theater.nytimes.com/2011/06/18/theater/reviews/armistead-maupins-tales-of-the-city-the-musical-review.html?pagewanted=all



Theater Review
'Tales of the City'
When We Were Young and Gay,
Under the Disco Ball

By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
Published: June 17, 2011



Mary Birdsong as Mona, and Wesley Taylor as Michael, in “Tales of the City,” in San Francisco.


SAN FRANCISCO — The intoxicating abundance of Armistead Maupin’s beloved “Tales of the City” novels is one of their signal pleasures. Reading these intertwined stories of men and women searching for sex, love and themselves in the heady, indulgent atmosphere of San Francisco in the 1970s is like dipping into an inexhaustible bag of M&Ms, with no risk of sugar overload. The stories — of ardent friendships and surprising liaisons, startling family secrets and scandalous crimes — keep piling up and tumbling together, and somehow too much is never enough.

This addictive amplitude becomes something of a liability, unfortunately, for the lively and likable but overstuffed new musical adaptation of Mr. Maupin’s big-hearted portrait of a time, place and people, which is having a festive hometown premiere at the American Conservatory Theater. (Items in the gift shop include “Tales of the City” commemorative condoms: three for $6.) Although it is mostly drawn from just the first of the novels, with a few happy endings and shocking revelations imported from the second, the show cannot comfortably accommodate all the book’s significant characters and their curlicued collective destinies in the standard musical theater running time of under three hours.

Just about all the lovable, hateable and hoot-able gang is here: gay, straight and transsexual, lustily on the prowl or searching for enduring love, pampered by exorbitant wealth or straight from middle-class Cleveland. But despite the frequent interludes of soul-baring song, we never come to know them as intimately or as memorably as we do in the books, originally serialized in The San Francisco Chronicle,  or the terrific British mini-series seen on PBS in 1994. When the curtain falls, it’s as if you had been to a happening party and met lots of fabulous people, but kept getting whirled from one to the next without having enough time really to connect.

The musical boasts an accomplished creative team. The book is by Jeff Whitty, who depicted a later generation of young urban adventurers in the popular, Tony-laureled musical “Avenue Q.” Mr. Whitty is reunited with that show’s director, Jason Moore, while the score is by Jake Shears and John Garden of Scissor Sisters, the hip band whose music draws affectionately but not slavishly on signature sounds of the decade in question, from Elton John to Sylvester to KC and the Sunshine Band. Larry Keigwin, an acclaimed modern-dance choreographer known for his pop sensibility, provides the frisky if sometimes generic choreography.

Although the disco ball twirling as the overture began gave me pause — these silvered orbs have become harbingers of dramaturgical dreariness to me in recent years — the authors do not use superficial nostalgia as a serotonin trigger in the way so many new jukebox musicals today do. The show splashes about in the period-kitsch playground with happy abandon — there’s a scene at a roller disco, and the costumes by Beaver Bauer (a Maupin-worthy name) are a parade of sartorial sense-memory evocations for anyone who lived through the era — but the show never devolves into a generic 1970s theme night.

It doesn’t have time to, really, with so much storytelling to do. Mary Ann Singleton (Betsy Wolfe, who has a sensational voice), just off the plane from the hinterlands, senses that she has found a true home in this city of free spirits, although it takes her a while to scrub off the Midwestern prudery. Providing mentorship in living life to its fullest is her landlady at the magical aerie of 28 Barbary Lane, Anna Madrigal (a warm, winning Judy Kaye, even if she often sounds more patrician than bohemian), who mothers all her tenants with loving care and generous doses of homegrown marijuana.

Mary Ann’s fellow sibling-tenants are Michael Tolliver, known as Mouse (Wesley Taylor, of “Rock of Ages,” outfitted with a ’70s-clone mustache), eternally lovelorn, even as he gambols at the baths and bars; Mona Ramsey (a wry Mary Birdsong), Michael’s spiritual sister, whose fondness for pharmaceuticals knows no limits and whose relationship to Mrs. Madrigal provides a plot twist giving rise to “oohs,” even from an audience familiar with the material; and Brian Hawkins (Patrick Lane), the quintessential swinging bachelor of the day, who mostly comes across as a heterosexual place holder here.

The denizens of Mrs. Madrigal’s cozy home — disappointingly depicted as a series of antiseptic stairways and hallways in Douglas W. Schmidt’s set design — find themselves enmeshed in the soap operas of the local social circuit. Mary Ann snags a job working for an advertising magnate, Edgar Halcyon (Richard Poe), and conducts a brief, ill-considered liaison with his son-in-law Beauchamp Day (Andrew Samonsky), who neglects his post-debutante wife, DeDe (the perky, cartoonish Kathleen Elizabeth Monteleone). When she becomes pregnant, her gynecologist turns out to be none other than the handsome Jon Fielding (Josh Breckenridge), Michael’s on-again, off-again lover.

This précis  does not even bring us to the musical’s second act, in which significant new characters continue to be introduced. Could we not have dispensed with Norman Neal Williams (Manoel Felciano), one of the book’s more melodramatic figures, whose romance with Mary Ann is made slightly more plausible here by his less sinister depiction?

The traumatic end to their budding relationship does, however, occasion the musical’s most thrilling song, “Paper Faces,” a solo for Mary Ann that swells to become a soaring, goose-pimple-inducing ensemble number about the disguises people assume to seduce, beguile and sometimes betray. It’s so good that you want to hear it again as soon as the last chord dies out.

Mr. Shears and Mr. Garden display a more natural affinity for musical theater writing than the team of Bono and the Edge revealed in their tepid score for you know what; the songs in “Tales of the City” range from bawdy comic numbers to traditional solo ballads in which the principals give vent to the secret suffering in their hearts. But the loveliest moment in the show is one of the simplest, when Michael reads a coming-out letter he has written to his parents, accompanied by a wandering melody scored for piano and guitar that expresses the complicated mixture of feeling in the lyric.

Overall, however, the score is more efficient than memorable, and that’s essentially the problem with the musical as a whole. Enjoyable though “Tales of the City” is, you do sense that its creators have themselves been hard at work fitting together these interlocking stories and amplifying them with music without losing too much of the narrative pleasure of the novels. They have arrived at an admirable approximation of the books’ charms, yet an element of transcendence is missing.

Mr. Maupin’s literary style is not particularly sophisticated, line by line, but there is poetry in his depiction of the messy disorder of experience resolving itself into satisfying patterns. It’s this moving sense of finding beauty in the restless tumult of human lives that never quite comes through in the musical version. Time runs out before the characters have time to engage us on anything but a superficial level. True, life rarely affords us enough time to get to know everyone we’d like to. But it’s the business of art to satisfy us in ways that life cannot.

TALES OF THE CITY

Libretto by Jeff Whitty; music and lyrics by Jake Shears and John Garden; based on “Tales of the City” and “More Tales of the City,” by Armistead Maupin; directed by Jason Moore; choreography by Larry Keigwin; sets by Douglas W. Schmidt; costumes by Beaver Bauer; lighting by Robert Wierzel; sound by John Shivers; orchestrations by Bruce Coughlin; music supervisor, Carmel Dean; arrangements by Stephen Oremus and Ms. Dean; music director, Cian McCarthy; dramaturge, Michael Paller. Presented by the American Conservatory Theater, Carey Perloff, artistic director; Ellen Richard, executive director. At A.C.T., 415 Geary Street, San Francisco; (415) 749-2228, act-sf.org. Through July 24. Running time: 2 hours 55 minutes.

WITH: Judy Kaye (Anna Madrigal), Mary Birdsong (Mona Ramsey), Josh Breckenridge (Jon Fielding), Manoel Felciano (Norman Neal Williams), Diane J. Findlay (Mother Mucca), Patrick Lane (Brian Hawkins), Kathleen Elizabeth Monteleone (DeDe Halcyon-Day), Richard Poe (Edgar Halcyon), Julie Reiber (Connie Bradshaw), Andrew Samonsky (Beauchamp Day), Wesley Taylor (Michael Tolliver) and Betsy Wolfe (Mary Ann Singleton).
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"