Go-Go’s musical finding its beat
Candy-colored mermaid tails breach the surface of ocean waves and flick in sync toward a smiling sun. Sparkly nail polish beams all the way to the second balcony; metallic ruffs adorn shirtless chests. High Elizabethan English is brought low: “Ventilate the belfry of thy mind.” A dancer, standing stock-still, undulates his abs with such amplitude that it’s as if his stomach muscles alone are doing the breakdance move known as the Worm.
To all this flash and fizz, “Head Over Heels,” which opened Wednesday, April 18, at the Curran, adds the fun of the Go-Go’s. Hits from the groundbreaking ’80s band such as “We Got the Beat,” “Our Lips Are Sealed” and “Vacation”
give the musical a surging pulse, a raw edge, a rebel vibe. (And fittingly, an all-female live band performs Tom Kitt’s arrangements.)
But as the confection heads to Broadway this summer, it needs some tweaks to rise into the cream puff it wants to be. Based on the Renaissance play “The Arcadia” by Sir Philip Sidney, the show centers on an ancient Greek royal family cursed by Pythio, the Oracle of Delphi (Peppermint) to have its daughters Pamela (Bonnie Milligan) and Philoclea (Alexandra Socha) bed and wed unexpected suitors, its king ( Jeremy Kushnier) commit adultery against his queen (Rachel York) and the whole family lose its kingdom of Arcadia.
The characters in “Head Over Heels” might be silly, eyeballs darting wildly back and forth, but paradoxically, that silliness needs to be grounded in watertight logic to register. You can’t, in Scene 6, say, insist that a pair are crazy about each other when in the preceding five scenes they’ve communicated only mild exasperation with one another or, worse, total apathy. If Arcadia’s whole shtick is that it’s the kingdom with “the beat,” and that’s what it’s so afraid of somehow losing with the Oracle’s prophecy, maybe the show should mention or illustrate this “beat” more often than just at the very beginning and very end.
Book writer James Magruder, adapting from an original book conceived by Jeff Whitty, fails to launch the show with a clear focus. At first it seems like soubrette Mopsa (Taylor Iman Jones) will ground the story as narrator, but the script almost never returns to her, and whenever it does, her explanation pads rather than expedites. Then it seems like the king, journeying to the shapeshifting Oracle, will tie the story together, but he proves more MacGuffin than mainspring, as the show finally settles on the forbidden loves of the daughters.
Still, Michael Mayer’s direction affords plenty of joys. Lights by Kevin Adams capture the fires of lust; each time hues shift from, say, electric blue to magenta to bleached yellow, it’s as if characters’ desire has burned through something new. Costumes by Arianne Phillips ingeniously marry eras — how do you communicate “swimsuit” while still looking Elizabethan? — and amp up the show’s overall ridiculousness. The king and queen, in particular, look as if they got pummeled by “Bejeweled Blitz.”
To help find its beat, the rest of “Head Over Heels” might look to the zany pitch of Andrew Durand as Musidorus, a shepherd. He gives each discovery — a conveniently abandoned trunk of costumes, an invitation to fold ladies’ underwear — that extra zing of life that comes from core-to-fingertips ownership of character and situation.
If the calibre of singing varies, Socha’s voice spins gold, especially on the lesser-known GoGo’s song “Good Girls,” and York’s weathered rock star timbre, with a yowl waiting to erupt from every note, is so perfect for the material you wish she had more numbers. But even with little stage time, she proves what fans already knew: that the Go-Go’s music was ripe for musical theater.