Part A
ONLY GOLD
Book by Andy Blankenbuehler & Ted Malawer
Music and Lyrics by Kate Nash
Directed and Choreographed by Andy Blanklenbuehler
MCC Theatre
Reviewed by David Spencer
In a way, it was like seeing the same musical three times. Well, two-and-a half. The third has a story actually rooted in something aside from messaging. But let’s start at the top.
Only Gold is a fable existing in an unspecific era that may be the 20th Century. It tells the tale of a fictional country’s royal family. The King (Terrence Mann) wants to marry his daughter (Gaby Diaz) off to a Paris Count (Tyler Hanes) of a country with whom they need to establish a treaty; but she’s fallen in love with her father’s assistant (Ryan Steele), who used to be a hotel bellboy. Whoops. And the King and Queen (Karine Plantadit) have their own marital problems. (Most of them his. He doesn’t listen carefully, that man.) His first instinct is to recapture old glories with the replication of a lost necklace, the new one made by master jeweler’s son (Ryan Vandenbloom), soon to be a superstar, eclipsing the dreams of his aspiring concert pianist wife (Hannah Cruz), who must now struggle with whether and how to reclaim her own self-identity.
Familiar? You bet. Is the moral about empowerment? You guessed.
Very little of this is sung by the principles; most of it is sung about—by the chorus, and by the narrator, played (it somehow seems inevitably) by composer-lyricist and recording singer-songwriter Kate Nash. In the abstract, much of it is pleasant enough to listen to, but it employs a pop music vocabulary as familiar as the fable, that in its context makes Ms Nash seem a far more effective actress than musical dramatist. But it’s hard to be categorical; the book of a musical is key and the one provided by her librettists, director-choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler and Ted Malawar, serves up a fairly weak brew.
Why is such a small proportion of song given to the leads?
Because Only Gold is very much, very emphatically, and seems to have been conceived as, a dance show; because most of its leads are dancers before they’re actors and singers; and thus because most of them…well, I hate to say “can’t sing,” because they’re certainly musical enough in a native sense…but can’t cross over that hard-to-define boundary. They can obviously, beautifully move with the flow of music and they all seem to be able to carry a tune agreeably enough. But there’s a line of demarcation between that and having enough vocal character—call it a quality of brightness, of vibrancy—to put a song across. (There’s no greater illustration of this than, within the show itself, Terrence Mann being the one truly seasoned Broadway vocalist in a lead or consequential role within the story being told.)
But the lopsidedness of musical assignment highlights something conceptually amiss too. And it’s this:
If your intent is to create a musical that will primarily be carried by dedicated dancers crossing over into the theatre world, movement should be a key component of the story itself. It doesn’t have to be consciously acknowledged or dramatized as dance—it can be used metaphorically; poetically. But it has to be used to some core, organic, inextricable purpose.
In Only Gold, though, the story, slender as it is, would make total sense if dance were removed. Yes, its use of dance goes toward the expression of surface-and-subtextual emotion, and to impressionistically convey scenic shift—and that’s all to the good—but without dance having a more baked-in purpose, the choreography is really only delivered in the service of itself.
And it’s not enough.
Link to Part B: & Juliet
Link to Part C: Almost Famous