‘SpellBound!’ gives nod to Disney
Shakespearean musicals have a long tradition, although not always a glorious one. For every “West Side Story” or “Kiss Me, Kate” there’s also a “Rockabye Hamlet” or “Oh, Brother!”
Never heard of those? There’s a reason. “Oh, Brother” reset “The Comedy of Errors” in the modern Middle East, turning the Bard’s shipwrecked twins into victims of an airline hijacking. It opened on Broadway on Nov. 10, 1981, and closed the next night.
Into this fraught fray comes Southwest Shakespeare Company with “SpellBound!,” a world-premiere adaptation of “Cymbeline” set to a peppy pop-folk score and performed under the stars at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix.
As the title implies, the musical plays up the fairy-tale qualities of the script, at times charmingly, but this well-intentioned endeavor to win over Shakespeare neophytes is foiled by some of the most painfully inept songwriting to be found this side of open-mike night at your local coffeehouse.
“Cymbeline,” one of Shakespeare’s least-known plays, seems unlikely source material for a musical. Set in ancient Britain, it has a convoluted plot packed with every hoary cliche in the canon, including a wicked stepmother, a cross-dressing princess, a pair of longlost sons and a poisonous potion that induces a deathlike sleep.
Southwest Shakespeare artistic director Jared Sakren has wisely trimmed the script to its bare essentials, making it easy to follow the story of the headstrong princess Imogen (Janine Colletti, a sweet-voiced soprano) and her low-born lover Posthumus (Kyle Sorrell), exiled by the king (Tim Blough) for the crime of marrying his daughter.
The performance is most successful when it’s at its most Disneyfied. The scheming queen (Kathleen Berger), for example, is costumed like a Maleficent knockoff and even disguises her poison potion in an apple a la “Snow White.” And the crowd-pleasingest performance is that of Matt Zimmerer as the preening prince Cloten, mugging and posing and generally hamming it up as if he were in a broad comedy like “Robin Hood: Men in Tights.”
As director, however, Sakren doesn’t fully commit to the fairy-tale concept, letting most of his actors give straightahead readings that fall flat on the large outdoor stage. That is, until they break into song, which is when “SpellBound!” really misfires.
The songs are by Shishir Kurup and Dave “Marko” Markowitz, sharing credit for both music and lyrics. And the music is actually quite good, a blend of poppy melodies and vaguely medieval folk rhythms played by an onstage band that includes guitar, violin, mandolin and even a didgeridoo to add some some mystical rumbling to the proceedings.
The mix of old and new is much less successful in the lyrics, however, where Elizabethan locutions are studded with such modern colloquialisms as “She’s just a tramp” and “He talked the talk, but I walked the walk.”
At times, Kurup and Markowitz seem to be taking their cues from Gilbert and Sullivan, rhyming “theoretical” with “hysterical,” for example, or “etcetera” with “ephemera.” But they seem to be utterly clueless about the role that songs are supposed to play in musical theater.
Instead of giving voice to the characters’ inner thoughts or commenting on the action, these lyrics too often merely describe what is happening, and not particularly elegantly, either, as when Posthumus, presented with “proof” of his bride’s demise, laments, “I see the red of your blood on this cloth!” Or when the Reviewed Saturday, May 9. Continues Thursdays-Sundays, May 14-17 and 21-24. Desert Botanical Garden, 1201 N. Galvin Parkway, Phoenix. $35-$65. 480-435-6868, swshakespeare.org. villainous Iachimo (Joe Cannon) sneaks into Imogen’s chambers and croons, “I pull aside this blushing sheet / And gaze upon her naked breast so sweet.”
It rhymes, but it sure isn’t poetry. Reach the reviewer at kerry.lengel@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4896.