Death
Takes a Holiday tells a story
that has fascinated adapters ever since the original Italian play by Alberto
Casella debuted in 1924. Little
wonder when you know the premise:
The
dashingly handsome spectre of Death (Kevin Earley) appears to a middle-aged nobleman (Michael
Siberry) and announces that he
will take on the guise of a Russian Prince and be a guest in the nobleman’s
villa. Death, you see, has declined to take the nobleman’s daughter (Jill
Paice) after what should have
been a fatal accident, having seen something in her that makes him fall in
love. And now, for a weekend, he wants to experience life, to understand why
humans cling to it so tenaciously.
You
can remove details of place, era, nationality, class system and the story would
still survive as a supernatural tale, with its romance and philosophical
grounding intact. A number of adapters have indeed relocated the story, updated
the when and the sensibility; but the version at the Laura Pels, courtesy of
the Roundabout Theatre Company, the first musical adaptation, hews fairly close
to the particulars of the original play—said play, in its tame, almost
drawing room, treatment of matters supernatural being quaint and fragile, a
cross between a philosophical comedy of manners and a romantic fantasy. Which
means that the musical has to find its strength in the charm of the antiquated
storytelling, without falling prey to its obsolescence—and the
visceral passion of its central love story.
The musical,
alas, exploits neither to full advantage. The show looks terrific, it has a fine
cast, and under the direction of Doug Hughes they often perform charmingly (despite having few
charming things to perform; they’re very agreeable company). But those assets
are constrained and muted. For aside from the dramaturgy and musicalization
never quite finding a way to exploit the source material, they also fall short
of solving a central adaptive challenge—one that plagues musicalization
of romantic stories in general:
Romances
are soft.
Most
of the great love stories in musical theatre are sidebars to, or by-products
of, the main story, which is some kind of quest to achieve something. (Or in
the case of a show like West Side Story, the love story itself is the quest, as it struggles to survive in a
violent universe opposed to it.) But when the love story is front and center as primary point, there’s not much
to do except wade in the mood pool, as the lovers go through angsty transitions
and deny, then embrace, then recant, then accept their yearnings—and get
together or not, depending upon whether the ultimate cause is nobility that
must sacrifice for a greater good, or taking that one big transcendent leap of
the soul. Because so much about romance storytelling is internal, romances require the most
meticulous, subtle and ingenious narrative adjustments, if they’re to be
transformed into onstage musicals, because all that squidgy stuff needs to be somehow
reframed in active, external terms.
The
adapters here, both extremely talented men, composer-lyricist Maury Yeston and librettist Thomas Meehan (taking up the torch of a libretto begun by the late,
co-author-credited Peter Stone)
have taken an almost prosaic, no-frills style approach that seems less symbiotically
collaborative than respectfully deferential; as if the co-authors made
room for each other’s specialties without rigorous, in-depth
examination of their
mutual purpose. The book takes the story through its paces in an almost
perfunctory
manner—the introduction of Death, for example, and his subsequent
materialization to the household patriarch, are bewilderingly unmagical
moments—and leads us into songs, almost all of which expound upon
things
we already know. Which brings up the other trick one must constantly
pull off
with “soft” material:
You
have to engineer revelation—whether it relates to plot, character turning
point or any kind of discovery—so that it happens within song; that way exploitable emotion and music
dovetail. When those things are
separated, when revelation anticipates song, even by a few seconds, song loses urgency. It may not always
become dull, but it will perforce at its best only be able to mark time beautifully; and it will never
have the ability to move you, because it doesn’t uniquely house the event of the
scene, the catharsis of the moment. (There also seems to be a confusion of tone
in this musical; it doesn’t conflate romantic fantasy with comedy of manners as
the source play does, but seems to split the sub-genres further apart from each
other, sometimes reaching for sincere passion, sometimes parodying something
scary in the house stories, with
the posing archness of lesser Lerner.)
There
are other subtle problems as well. There has always been a disparity
between
Mr. Yeston’s music and lyrics, the words several kliks less
accomplished and graceful than the melodies and arrangements; but
usually at least a unity of purpose, a
match of tone, saves the day. In Death Takes a Holiday, however, the gap is wider than ever. The music is
often rapturous—also mischievous, catchy, bouncy and tasty, richly and
fully developed—but the lyric craft is haphazard (strained and labored
rhymes, patter that’s too “fat” to be articulated cleanly, oddly stiff
locutions, etc.). Still…the craft shortfalls aren’t the primary problem; and if
they were the only problem, you could shrug them off, however grudgingly. The central
problem is that the lyricist
simply isn’t connecting to his characters on a visceral level; the lyrics spend
an awful lot of time describing
states of emotional being without actually evoking them, as if they’re rhymed aids to psychological
profiling. Only one early Act Two number, in which a mother mourns the loss of
her son, truly lands in the manner of Best Yeston, because it’s the only one in
which the language is simple and human and real, borne of the songwriter’s
authentic identification with parenthood. (It also doesn’t hurt that the song
is sensitively sung by the wonderful Rebecca Luker, but, again, the number gives her a lot to be
sensitive about.)
In
short, the show has been comprehensively written, but hasn’t truly been realized, adapted but not transformed. It’s as if, along with Death, Birth (and reason
for being) has likewise taken time off…
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