I will never—well, probably
that should be almost never, but so far
as my remembered experience goes, never—begrudge a show its
honestly-earned success (even if I concede it grudgingly), because you can’t
argue with an audience response that’s strong and unequivocal. And the revival
of Side Show certainly garners that.
It’s
easy to see why this musical has harbored a cult following, despite a 1997-98
Broadway run that lasted only 91 performances; and easy to see why, in this
re-conceived version, it looks to have moved into the mainstream.
The
story, beginning in the late 1920s, is a good one. After we’ve been adjured to
“Come Look at the Freaks” by the sideshow Boss (Robert Joy), himself giving a performance of unintentional
grotesquerie, we meet the beautiful, sympathetic twin Hilton girls, shy Violet
(Erin Davie) and flirtations
Violet (Emily Padgett), whose
only irregularity is that they’re conjoined. They are discovered by Terry (Ryan
Silverman) an agent-manager type who can
make bookings on the Orpheum vaudeville circuit, and his partner buddy (Matthew
Hydzik), a song-and-dance man. The twins
are wrested/rescued from the sideshow—along with the faithful Jake (David
St. Louis), a powerful black man who until
then has played the sideshow’s resident cannibal, the only one of that
“ensemble” not deformed, to serve as general caretaker and assistant for the
twins—and what happens along the way is of course inevitable: Daisay will
fall for Buddy and Violet for Terry…(while Jake, quietly lovesick over Daisy,
watches from a pained distance, certain that the girls are not being loved for
themselves). Not surprisingly in a musical, the feelings are reciprocated…but
the conviction to follow through under the circumstances is another matter…and
ultimately the conflict at the heart of the story. Our heroines want to live
normal lives “like everybody else.” Will they get their wish?
The
score (music: Henry Kreiger) is just
spiky enough to suggest the harsh carnival/media spotlights, though in general
it exists in an anachronistic soft rock vocabulary. Even the “source” songs
that the sisters perform on vaudeville stages (as opposed to book songs that
come as an outgrowth of dramatic action) are not quite pastiches
in the vocabulary of the period; they utilize some of the tropes and forms as a
kind of filtering agent but they suggest the era styling more than they
literally represent it. The book is hugely improved over the previous version
written solo by Bill Russell; director Bill
Condon, who contributed the revisions, has
stripped away most of the recitative (previously the show had
been through sung) and substituted dialogue with some wit, deepening certain
characters in the process, and further sharpened what was already a clean
narrative line. Russell’s lyrics, however, remain a strange hybrid of clear,
economical structural architecture, and graceless clunkiness in the actual
locution. It’s like a benign but unseemly metastasis in an otherwise robust
body.
Condon’s
direction is as pointed and focused as his rewrites; he’s abetted by a
crackerjack design team who never let the universe become too literal; and the
cast is across-the-board first-rate. Whatever alchemical thing has happened as
the new personnel have wrought their changes and the original creative team has
wrought theirs in tandem has clearly moved Side Show out of its cult status and, very likely, into the
class of mainstream hit.
There
are those, though, who, like me, still find the material a bit wanting. Even
with very diminished recitative, it’s still very beholden to the Euro-musical
style in the sense that most of it is declamatory; there’s a degree of subtext
in the scenes, but very little in the songs, with the result that—again,
only for some—Side Show impresses
up to a point but never truly gets under the skin. At best, we’re engaged,
never really moved.
But
I guess that’s to be expected. Since the original creative team and the core of
their work must remain the same—it is their baby after all, and from the
core came the cult—what else could a revised Side Show be, really, but a better version of the same thing…?
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