AISLE SAY New York

ADDING MACHINE

Libretto by Jason Loewith and Joshua Schmidt
Music by Joshua Schmidt
Directed by David Cromer
Minetta Lane Theatre
addingmachineamusical.com

Reviewed by David Spencer

While I’ve gone on record numerous times to say that I’m not a great fan of musicals by people who don’t know much about writing musicals, I have to say I’m of quite a different mind about musical evenings that clearly aren’t trying to be musicals, so long as they hit the marks they set out to hit. Adding Machine, at the Minetta Lane, is one such rarity; for though the show cards, ads, website and posters proclaim it a musical, it isn’t at all; it’s a modern opera, and very consciously so. I’m not a great fan of modern opera either because it so often seems an excuse for musical meandering in atonal territory, with libretto meandering to match, but this adaptation of Elmer Rice’s dark, impressionist 1923 play (its title distinguished from the opera by a The at its start) is a smart, streamlined compression (libretto by Jason Loewith and composer Joshua Schmidt) of a much longer and more didactic work—yet it’s very faithful to tone and intention. It keeps the essentials and takes you on a dark, yet weirdly exhilarating ride.

It’s about the henpecked Mr. Zero (Joel Hatch), whose shrill wife (Cyrilla Baer) is a relentless gossip and judgmental harridan, never letting him off the hook for being a lowly number cruncher at some large, unnamed firm. Adding insult to that which insult gets added to, he learns, on his 25^th anniversary with the firm, that he is to be replaced by a mechanical adding machine. Sometime later, at Zero’s home, during dinner with two invited couples, the cops knock on the door, and Zero casually drops that he murdered his boss (Jeff Still). The rest of the story follows Zero's journey to Death Row and thence the afterlife in the Elysian Fields where he is presented with one last chance for redemption and romance—with Daisy (Amy Warren) the office worker he always secretly fancied.

Joshua Schmidt’s score is a model of impressionism, because it genuinely translates the moods and dramatic themes of the play into emotionally consistent and coherent musical metaphor, whether with the odd dip into pastiche (a bouncy 20s-style number about optimistic yearning), the literalness of musical onomatopoeia (numbing repetition, a la Philip Glass, to represent the drudgery of filling a ledger with numbers, day in and day out), or the more viscerally connected use of chords, clusters, intervals, rhythms, textures and all the other tools in a worthy composer’s kit. You don’t walk out humming the tunes, but rather vibrating to the aesthetic.

Of course a piece like this doesn’t land successfully without a director who gets it and is up to the challenge, but it has that in David Cromer, who, with a pitch perfect design team (sets: Takeshi Kata, costumes: Kristine Knanishu, lighting: Keith Parham, properties: Michele Spadaro, sound: Tony Smolenski IV), gives Broadway one of the most atmospheric, even otherworldly physical productions it has seen since…since ever actually. Part of the design would seem to be the excellent cast, who aside from those already mentioned, are Joe Farrell, Adinah Alexander, Niffer Clarke, Roger E. DeWitt and Daniel Marcus. These are not, at least not in the showbiz, youth-drenched, John Hughes and “here on the WB” sense, pretty people. These are people the way people look when they’re not the people that people-gazers look at. But it’s Elmer Rice’s contention that there is the potential for beauty in all, and the courage of the creative team is in engaging a company qualified to sell that in as uncompromising a manner as possible.

Adding Machine insiders have joked among themselves and to friends that, for all the good reviews (and there have been many), there many not be the desired “shelf life” for a show touted as wonderful when the adjectives that accompany the sentiment tend toward words like dark, depressing, bleak, unremitting and the like. But those are flat words, which come nowhere near conveying the dimension they take on within the opera; a dimension that renders such qualities their opposite in terms of affect. For all its heaviness, Adding Machine is at heart filled with the helium of hope…

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