Richard Rodgers wrote his first song when he was 14 and composed tunes for his first musical comedy when he was a college undergraduate. Beginning in 1918, when he began his collaboration with lyricist Lorenz Hart, and carrying on for many more years with such famous collaborators as Oscar Hammerstein II and Stephen Sondheim (just once), he composed scores of memorable songs for the American musical theater.
Making music for him was almost like breathing (or, in Rodgers’ blunt language, like other, less rarefied bodily functions).
Drawing on this amazing composer’s huge songbook, director Sheldon Patinkin has conceived a new musical revue that uses a five-person cast and a four-person band to spin out 60 Rodgers tunes for an evening’s entertainment at the National Jewish Theatre.
The tunes have been grouped so that they form a romantic musical of courtships, weddings, honeymoons, flirtations, fights, reunions and happy endings. There’s no dialogue; the lyrics, the setting and the staging provide the story.
Christopher DeAngelis and Kelly Prybycien, who handle most of the fancy footwork dancing, and Dale Morgan and Anne Kaenengeiser, who have the stronger voices, are the newlyweds. Nancy Voigts is the woman who, as the sultry hostess of their honeymoon hotel, causes complications in their billing and cooing.
As a device for stringing together a lot of dissimilar songs, this invention works fairly well, but after a while, even the Rodgers melodies begin to pale through an overabundance of material. A certain repetitiveness creeps in.
Less might have been more in this evening; maybe 10 songs fewer would have made the show even more enjoyable. Or perhaps the production might have been helped by a brighter and more sophisticated design. John Murbach’s setting, a kind of Spanish hacienda in which musical director Kingsley Day’s quartet is ensconced, is mundane, as are, surprisingly, the stodgy costumes of Jordan Ross. Linda Leonard’s choreography, meanwhile, is standard show dance stuff, rarely rising above the routine.
However, the tunes, sung without amplification, are terrific, and in a couple instances, they get beautiful treatment.
In a song usually reserved for men, Kanengeiser shapes a lovely “Some Enchanted Evening.” Voigts, when she’s not overplaying her coyness or pushing her big voice into ambulance siren blasts, is a deft comic actress. And the two couples, joining voices in harmony, exquisitely polish the dark luster of “Where or When.”
Listening to all those Rodgers songs, one can’t help being impressed with his adaptablity, as well as his musicality. He moved easily from the breezy wit of Hart’s lyrics to the gorgeous romanticism of Hammerstein’s words; and, though his partnerhsip with Sondheim on “Do I Hear a Waltz?” was not a happy one, his music dovetailed perfectly with Sondheim’s tricky lyric invention, as the generous sampling of songs from that 1965 show demonstrates.
“Falling in Love with Love,” it should be noted, is the final production of American Jewish Theatre’s ninth season.
A cutoff of funding from the parent Jewish Community Centers has thrown the theater’s future in doubt, but Joyce Sloane, the theater’s board president, believes she has enough money to continue and mount a 10th anniversary season, if she is able to work out an arrangement with the JCC for use of the theater in the Mayer Kaplan JCC.
She should know within the next few weeks.
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“Falling in Love with Love” plays through July 30 at the National Jewish Theatre, 5050 W. Church St. Skokie. Phone 708-675-5070.
