The internet magazine of stage reviews and opinion

Reviewed by David Spencer

 

With so much of the landscape changing, there are times when I feel as if “reviewing” should pointedly sidestep my personal opinion of a piece and just be a report on what I objectively observed. Particularly with certain new musicals, and I’ll tell you why.

When writing musicals is what you do for all or part of your living, one of the most important rewarding/disturbing parts of the job is training yourself to read the audience. It shouldn’t be that hard to do; technically the read is unequivocal; but because writing musicals requires such a huge investment of self and self-esteem, it’s hugely difficult—until one day it isn’t—to be unsentimental about it. You have to get past that urge to will the audience to dig something that isn’t putting itself over.

To be sure, there is indeed a list of non-defensive, ideally addressable reasons why a line, a joke, a song, a passage isn’t working as it should (Ed Kleban boiled them down to a list of 17), and you have to be mercilessly attuned to those too; and there’s also the hopefully-only-attempted interference of people with influence who don’t know how to read audience signals one way or the other, and just have opinions…

But let’s not take those detours. Let’s assume a healthy support system is in place; and that direction, design and performances are in the groove.

The trifecta you want too achieve is this: The jokes land; the numbers that button get a quick, loud, enthusiastic bang of applause (variously sustained, as appropriate to where you are in terms of tone, emotional intensity and progression of the story); and you get the pindrop silent “sound” of concentration. Not merely “paying attention.” But concentration. The frisson of an audience hanging on what happens next.

Whenever any of those things don’t happen as and where you want them to, you have a problem. And you have to solve it.

But when they all happen: We’ll, kids, that’s the brass ring, And once you know how to read the audience when your own work is on the line, you can read an audience when you’re watching the work of others.

And the same state of unsentimentality applies: it doesn’t matter if you love the show and the audience isn’t responding; or if you dislike the show and the audience is responding. You have to be completely objective about the experience.

So here goes:

The musical, book and lyrics by David Lindsay-Abaire, music by Jeanine Tesori, is based on Abaire’s play from the turn of the millennium, about a high school student (Victoria Clark) with a rare disease that ages her rapidly; at 16, she looks near 60 and she’s almost already outlived her life expectancy statistics. The tale, however, is not told grimly. Rather, it immerses its heroine in a universe where her well-meaning but inept parents (Steven Boyer, Alli Mauzey), a larcenous aunt (Bonnie Milligan), the young man who hovers on being her boyfriend (the attraction is mutual; Justin Cooley) and her classmates are all as offbeat and idiosyncratic as her disease…perhaps not ironically, she’s the one with the stablest disposition.

My feelings about Kimberly Akimbo are mixed and would seem to be subjective. On first experience of the libretto’s construction and first listen to the score, I’m not as “sold” on the experience as I want to be. I got a feeling of narrative sprawl, because the book moves forward with no single plotline being central, but rather via several interweaving ones involving Kimberly moving variously among them, sometimes taking the lead, sometimes a concerned observer. The music and lyrics, in naturally following this scenario, also seemed to me to have a kind of wandering identity. But absolutely none of that matters.

Because I didn’t see any evidence that the audience found that to be true. (There may have been individuals who did, but as Peter Stone once sagely remarked about audience reaction, individually everybody is wrong and collectively everybody is right. Collectively, the audience is on board all the way.)

Kimberly Akimbo demonstrably lands the trifecta: laughs, applause, concentration. And a quick-to-rise, powerful standing O from the audience when it’s over. Of course it doesn’t hurt that the cast is uniformly excellent and that Jessica Stone, previously best known as a musical theatre actress, proves a musical theatre director with whom to be to be well-reckoned. But I don’t think it’s a case of the delivery system being better than the material, There’s a confluence of elements here that lands like crazy with the audience, and if I was to guess what the glue is, it’s that they love love love Kimberly: the character of her, idea of her, the irony of her even disposition, the innate theatricality of her condition, allowing for a seasoned actress to quietly put forth a tour de force. Add to that glue that the authors, understanding the lure and charm of their main character, have thrown everything they have into support of her and the world that puts her in relief.

One has to count Kimberly Akimbo a win.

But now let’s move uptown to Flying Over Sunset.

Set in the mid-late 1950s, its main, real-life characters are three who were, among other callings, writers—outspoken political conservative and playwright Clare Booth Luce (Carmen Cusak); Nobel laureate Aldous Huxley (Harry Hadden-Paton); dedicated spiritualist Gerald Heard (Robert Sella)—and movie star Cary Grant (Tony Yazbeck). Though they were all residing simultaneously in Los Angeles at the time they meet in the story, they did not in fact band together in real life…but because they all experimented with the psychotropic drug LSD, on the premise that it would be mind-and-perception enhancing, librettist-director James Lapine offers his version of a What-if-they-had? scenario.

We’re introduced to each of them, one at a time, having or embarking on solo trips. It takes a while for the score to kick in, because in Flying Over Sunset, song (skilled and pithy lyrics by Michael Korie, deftly attractive music by Tom Kitt) is a function of being under the influence, the metaphor seeming to be that the elevated state triggers the elevated vocabulary of music and lyrics. And through these initial “outings,” the play touches upon the demons that variously haunt their respective victims. Gerald Heard is the guru in common with Luce and Huxley and when a chance meeting in a restaurant brings Grant into the fold, it is decided that they should all gather at Luce’s beach house overlooking the Pacific Ocean and trip together.

What happens next…and this isn’t a spoiler, it’s the inevitability…is that, under the influence of group immersion, the issues that haunt them blossom, replete with ghosts of their past (and a more anonymous chorus of ghosts to support the ghosts), thereby to be confronted and better understood toward various stages of resolution, once they return to real life.

There’s way too much craft and meticulous focus involved for Flying Over Sunset to be dull—and the performances are excellent too—but it never makes its reason for being compelling. Why, in 2021-2022, are we watching the drug-induced introspection of four well-regarded, well-off, middle-aged white folks who don’t seem to have that much on the existential line other than the usualdemons that might send one into therapy: personal loss, confused self-identity and etc? None of them is in such trouble that they’d be unable to, as the saying goes, “handle the truth” without chemical enhancement…and since they know their demons going in, getting at the truth doesn’t seem to need it either; the revelations and resolutions of the confrontations hold little surprise—they would be the desired result of regular, competent therapy—; and in the final segment of the show, our quartet seems compelled to explain what they’ve learned, as if it wasn’t self-evident. Which leaves the audienceto ponder what the piece is trying to tell us. Does it really mean to promulgate the unprescribed, unsupervised use of a psychotropic drug—even one particular, “popular” drug—as a gateway to enlightenment? Surely there’s more meant than that. But it didn’t reach me.

And here I observed an audience notgetting it as well. I don’t mean not understanding thenarrative. I mean collectively—again, despite whatever individual exceptions there may have been and will always be—not connecting to the beating heart of it. The score is coherent, but as its song forms are often hallucinogenically fluid, in keeping with the metaphor, it doesn’t deliver many traditional set pieces; and the few that are delivered (for example, one where Cary Grant, in a shrink’s office, relives his vaudeville origins as a child singer and hoofer) land with the audience as a kind of relief, because they anchor the proceedings in contained, unambiguous terminology and allow a response of appreciating a moment. I didn’t notice any intended laughs not landing, but the libretto, though not humorless, is also not meantas humorous. I did, alas, notice only mild applause for most of the numbers that buttoned (save the exceptions I just mentioned); and finally—and here I can only report on the evidence of the single performance I saw—there was no full standing ovation at the end. These days there are always standees if all hands are performing at the top of their game in a polished production; but when more than half of the audience stays seated at a new musical of significant pedigree…applauding with great respect, but only limited gusto…that discrepancy is a tell.

I won’t go as far as saying it’s a tell of failure. In fact, I’ll submit that Flying Over Sunset is delivering exactly what it means to, with a collective talent pool whose determined, uncompromising dedication to the road they’re on is to be admired. The rules of its game are laid out and scrupulously followed. But the thesis is elusive. And thus, audience investment in the game is limited.