The ape is great. I have no problem with the ape.
He is, as the animated cartoon theme song extolled, "ten times as big as a man,"
and manipulated by {{14}} operators, ten of them hands on, four backstage to
handle the electronics, and as always when puppetry is done that well, the fact
of your seeing any of the manipulation is completely irrelevant to the
success of the illusion, as long as you want to believe, and who doesn’t?; it
was as true of Daniel Striped Tiger, the one man hand puppet, animated and
voiced by Fred Rogers.
No,
it’s the show itself that lumbers and thuds. Even when it’s energetic and
sortakinda entertaining. And yes, I’ll duly explain that.
Without
going into its history, the musical King
Kong is one of those thrill rides assembled by a committee of what I call—
this is the family-friendly version—people
who think they know stuff. Not necessarily all of them, I have zero inside track; the only thing that’s
absolutely clear from the finished show is that key decisions were made
by folks who don’t have a clue how a musical is constructed and don’t want to have a clue, because they live
in the happy-dappy delusion that confuses craft with creakiness and tells them
that if they go renegade with "creatives" all new to the musical theatre process,
without training, breeding or even a sense of contextual history, they will
break new ground for being untainted by the oldschool ways.
This
is exactly as misguided (the politest word I have for it) as commissioning a novel from someone who can’t punctuate,
spell or express himself grammatically, just because he won’t be influenced by
the literature he never studied. But you know that.
Victimized
on some level by this thinking is British librettist Jack Thorne,
generally a good writer, as evidenced
by his script for the Harry Potter play
and a rousing fantasy-horror TV series about angels that you should totally
check out, called The Fades, among
other credits. But his script for KK is
overburdened with nods to political correctness, especially in its portrait of
central character Ann Darrow. Because the decision was made to cast her
as an African American, rather than a blonde Fay Wray clone, yet also not to
acknowledge her ethnicity in the text, in case an actress of different
ethnicity ever assay the role. The script has to affect a neutrality about her,
that both defies the social realities of the period (the 1930s) and makes
conspicuous the effort to avoid admitting them. This is exacerbated by an
all-but-declared feminist feistiness to her, to make sure that we’re clear that
the monkey’s heartthrob is nobody’s victim…least
of all the monkey’s. (There are a number of other such politically correct
tells in the way other main characters are drawn and how Ann Darrow relates to
them, and even in a few details of plot-revision, but let’s leave it as Ann
as representative of the malady.)
All
this said, I have no more problem with the concept
of making a rounded character out of Ann Darrow—nor of changing her
ethnicity, nor of trying to fashion
the role such that ethnicity is never a consciously acknowledged factor, to be
exploited or not, as best casting may mandate—than I do with the puppet. The
problem is that, as delivered, Ann Darrow is not so much that intended renovated
character as she is the animated concept for renovation. She’s
not a well-rounded personality, she’s a boilerplate update who ticks off all
the manifesto talking points. Actress Christiani Pitts does as
well with
the task as anybody of considerable talent could, but filling in all
those agendas to produce a credible character is an impossible
assignment.
We
travel now from book to score. This is the program credit: Score Composed and
Produced by Marius de Vries; Songs by Eddie Perfect. This isn’t quite the same
as Glen Kelly shadow-composing harmony and accompaniment beneath the Mel Brooks melodies for a music
supervisor credit. This is a corporate, pop-record-company division of labor. As
such, it actually yields a bifurcated experience, because there are whole
swatches of the show in which its identity as a musical per se might legitimately be in question, because there’s only
power-underscoring where songs might have served better, if those songs were written by a
seasoned voice or voices. As for those sections where there are songs, Eddie Perfect does what every other rock recording star does
when enticed to try his hand at musical theatre: he looks for familiar
signposts and then fills them with familiar tropes, without any but the most
surface (if that) service paid to dramatic theme, overall musical consistency,
subtext or genuine characterization. The show starts with a big company number,
sung and danced to impressive scenic effects and projections, about a “City
goin’ up, up, city goin’ up,” depicting New York on the architectural rise,
probably meant as a precursor to Kong on the Empire State Building later. Maybe
ten-to-fifteen minutes later—after Ann Darrow goes through her city montage as an actress largely
ignored by casting people, to be at last conveniently lunch-counter-discovered by film
director-producer Carl Denham (engagingly opportunistic Eric William Morris)—she (and we) are quickly taking the perilous journey to Skull
Island, aboard a ship whose Captain (Roy Donovan in muscular voice), a minor character
with no appreciable function other than exposition facilitation, who will
disappear from the show not long after, is thrown the lead vocal in a
steamship-movin’-fast number, and gets to sing, “Gotta keep the pressure on,
keep the pressure-pressure on.” It’s not the same number. It doesn’t come off
as a leitmotif. It’s just unwittingly repetitious travelogue writing. Look: We’re in New York City in the ‘30s!!! Look: We’re on a big boat
to danger!!! Empty calories. And oh, heavens, let’s not even get into Ann’s eleven o’clock song to the
ape. I bet you’ve already guessed it’s a generic power ballad.
All
this being true, the show is never dull, it looks fantastic and it moves along
with the assurance of a bullet train (save for those few musical moments when
Eddie’s imperfection goes beyond mere boilerplate function to stop it cold).
You have to give director-choreographer Drew McOnie credit for that. For
more than that: for epic traffic
management; for a sharp, consistent eye; and for cleanly telling the story he
has to tell.
But
without real musical theatre writing to support all that, what a missed
opportunity.
And
what a low-yield use of a high-grade ape.
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