The
Wrong Man is a tough one to
parse. It belongs to that unofficial but nonetheless distinct new(ish) category,
that I will simply call the Pop Writer Musical.
This is a musical whose authorship comes from the recording industry. The
author may or may not have begun with a fondness for musicals in general, but
what he (or she) doesn't have is any
appreciable self- or formal training in the principles of songwriting craft or
libretto structure. On extremely rare
occasion, you get a crossover artist like David Yazbek who weaned himself on musicals, understands the difference between the
pop and theatre tool kits (having cultivated both), and inevitably found
himself counted among the mainstream practitioners, and collaborating with
mainstream librettists, because he understands that being a renegade and being
a traditionalist are not perforce mutually exclusive states. But usually what
you get is a recording artist guy winging it with the pop music toolkit he or
she has.
There are stark advantages and stark
disadvantages.
The stark advantages can include a bracingly fresh
approach to the kind of music being employed (it's usually just pop music
standard, but let's go with the best examples); and to aspects of the lyrical
language…in being unconstrained by precedent, the lyrics can bring in a
contemporary equivalent to a kind of Yip Harburg playfulness. No, I don't remotely
mean in his class of skill or dexterity…but nonetheless bending language in surprising ways.
The stark disadvantages can, and always do, include a
complete lack of subtext. The songs tell everything, and every character
proclaims his state of being on the surface, with full self-awareness and no
ability to engage on a psychological level that lets you, say, understand
something about the character that he himself does not (e.g. Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady singing "I'm an Ordinary
Man") or singing with an agenda that's implied rather than specific (e.g. Mama
Rose singing "Some People" to her father, because she wants to hock his award
plaque for the money to help her show business aspirations). A corollary to
this is storytelling that is basic, meandering, clumsily (if at all)
structured, long-winded, repetitious and generally unsurprising.
And of course, this is where directors (and
choreographers or director-choreographers) come in. None of these pieces, none of them, has enough self-supporting
integrity (by which I don't mean the honesty of the writer[s], but the
sturdiness of what they've created) to exist without being filtered through a
director's concept; without being buttressed by the bells-and-whistles of
movement to create physical activity where there's no intrinsic narrative
activity; without being "labbed" through the dramaturgical re-shaping of
component parts to create transitions, clarified (or invented) threads, and the
overall appearance of an actual show; without visual-dramaturgical interest
surgically woven through what's really only a concept album song cycle tracing
the general outline of a story.
And The Wrong Man, book, music and lyrics by Ross
Golan, is exactly that.
What makes it hard to parse is that this kind of
approach is no longer idiosyncratic; it has become part of the landscape, and
it's increasingly common. And in thus defining its own mainstream territory, it has conditioned newer, younger audiences
to take it in. The development is not sudden—it has its roots in a combination
of the Euro-musical tradition (going back to at least Hal Prince's
deconstruction/reconstruction of Webber-Rice's Evita) and certain counter-cultural benchmarks like Hair—but the explosion is…and that may
have been triggered by Hamilton, which
is an anomaly that bridges the gap—because its
author, Lin-Manuel Miranda, is a genuine musical theatre baby, who, like
Yazbek has both the pop and
dramaturgical toolkits, but chooses to let pop elements predominate.
Indeed, The
Wrong Man is directed by Hamilton's own Thomas Kail.
The story is so slender that it's hard to avoid
spoilers, but I'll try. I think Mr. Golan means it to function as a kind of agit-prop
manifesto about racial inequities in the justice system…but mostly, he's written
a present day noir drama. After a
meandering beginning of main-character backstory that doesn't really clue us into the kind of
ride we're going to be on, our main guy, ex-miltary African American Duran (Joshua Henry) goes to a bar and meets "the
wrong woman" (Ciara Renée); not the
wrong kind of woman (that's another noir trope), but one who has come out of
a bad relationship with a bad guy who went to jail for beating on her and has a
penchant for revenge (Ryan Vasquez).
I'll leave it there. (Save noting from the program that Mr. Vasquez is also an
alternate for the role of Duran; is ethnicity in this story more a mutable
factor than I thought? Hard to say…but I think that may go toward resting my
case.)
And indeed, there's not much more to say, for due to my my long preamble, I've pretty much reviewed
the show backwards. The performers are highly skilled, the music is
attractively renegade, the lyrics function as I said; and it all properly pushes
audience buttons in the manner of a skilled, live music video.
And I'm not going to tell you there's anything wrong with that. That kind of thing is
too much a part of the zeitgeist now to condemn out of hand without seeming
(indeed without being) out of touch.
But I can tell you that, like every other zeitgeist
trend that ever existed, there's no future in it as a model for emulation; it
hasn't the depth of technique or vocabulary. Except maybe, maybe, that such as The Wrong
Man may be some kind of gestational step, a way of insinuating some new
vocabulary, to help bridge older and newer sensibilities, even as the
traditional verities remain eternal. And that's a necessary function, I think.
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