Almost
immediately the musical Little House on the Prairie telegraphs that it’s in trouble. The
overture
(music by Rachel Portman)
makes a lot of big overture-y noises, previewing a ballad, an 11:00
number, an
up tempo song, and though the language is familiar, the tunes are
utterly
nondescript—my companion of the evening even called it
“The Anonymous
Overture.”
Then
the curtain opens on teenaged Laura Ingalls (the sprightly and engaging
Kara
Lindsay) singing a song
called
“Thunder” about wagon wheels and going out west and stuff; but it isn’t
really
about her except tangentially (she’s excited), nor is it really about
what she
wants, except sortakinda vaguely—the concomitant problem being we
haven’t
properly met her yet—so the show kicks off with an under-defined main
character and without properly articulating a theme for the evening.
Then the
ensemble comes on and everybody’s a-headin’ out west, and they sing “Up
Ahead”
a song about that.
Then
the rest of the Ingalls family comes on (if you know the Laura Ingalls
Wilder
books—or the TV series based on them, that shares the musical’s and the
first
book’s title—you’re familiar with the clan): Laura’s two sisters, the
younger
Carrie (Carly Rose Sonenclar)
and the
older Mary (Alessa Neeck),
Pa (Steve
Blanchard) and Ma (Melissa
Gilbert, who played Laura on TV).
Now
pay attention, because this is important:
Ma’s
concerned about moving out west. She wants the girls to be safe, to
have a
steady and secure life.
“I’ll keep them safe, Caroline,” says Pa, “On my life I will.” And then
Ma
relents a little, negotiating and says, “I want to live where there are
trees…I
want a house with curtains on the windows…and I want the girls to go to
school.”
Then
they all get musical theatre happy and join the ensemble in singing
part two of
“Up Ahead.”
You
tell me what’s wrong. Read it again.
Here’s
a hint: look at what’s sung. Look at what’s not.
That’s
right. What’s sung is a generic song about travelin’. What’s not—is
what one of the primary decision-making characters, the mother of the
brood,
wants if she’s to agree to
go
west.
Not only does this forsake
dramatic tension, it
misses using the score to set up tension and dramatic irony to
follow—because the house,
trees, school and normalcy that Ma wants for her kids will be precisely
the
most challenging things to realize out West. There’ll be bad weather,
sparse
crops, scarlet fever that leaves one of the daughters blind…it’s a
classic
structure. And it gives the authors a clear, clean, classic (yet not
clichéd)
way into their show. Yet they jump right over it.
The
evening goes by with scene after scene and song after song always
missing the
mark in just this fashion. As an inevitable corollary, it also suffers
from a
confusion of tone, bouncing between an attempt to emulate Rodgers and
Hammerstein Americana and extreme musical comedy (throwing a
disproportionate amount of
material to Laura’s well-dressed, stuck-up rival Nellie, played as if
she were
Glenda in Wicked by Kate
Loprest,
who, as I consult her bio—sure enough!—has played Glenda in Wicked;
and I hasten to add, that’s not a
criticism: she’s good at it, and doing exactly what the misguided
creative team
has hired her to do).
The
book by Rachel Sheinkin is
the most competent of the authorship
elements in the economical way it condenses the grand arc of the Wilder
books,
but that efficiency is compromised by there being no discernable
underlying
theme to give the adaptation resonance or cohesion. The lyrics by Donna
di
Novelli are simply bland,
trivial, forced and
awful.
As
for Melissa Gilbert in the role of Ma—she’s not as effective a stage
actress as she is a TV one, she doesn’t have theatrical wattage, but
she’s
absolutely able, attractive, competent and agreeable, which is all that
matters. Because
clearly—and wisely, perhaps the one genuinely wise architectural stroke
of the show—the role of Ma has been conceived as the “guest star” spot.
Of course you cast Melissa Gilbert to open, that's your name
power "draw," but she won’t stay with the show forever,
so you make hers a role attractive and musically simple enough to take
on a series
of popular “guest stars” with similar TVQ, and as-limited musical
theatre
gifts, after she leaves the production. But you’d think such a
“guest star”
spot would actually treat the actress it’s hosting as an actual guest.
The role
is so blandly written, her musical material so uninspired,
cliché-ridden and
slender, that poor Ms. Gilbert is rendered almost unimportant. And it
takes a
LOT of blandness to do that.
The
rest of the cast (including reliable Broadway stalwart Steve
Blanchard as Pa) work hard and
well under direction by Francesca
(The Little Mermaid)
Zambello, which is as bland
as the material.
It’s
no little irony either that the musical Little House is about a girl who
grows up to be a teacher. Because
not one of the creative team seems to have a grip on so much as Musical
Theatre
101…