We review ‘Mark Twain’s River of Song’ at Theatre Works.
Abundance of talent doesn’t quite make ‘River of Song’ sing
“Mark Twain’s River of Song” isn’t a particularly bad title for a Mark Twain musical. A bit sentimental sounding, surely, but straight to the point. The “River” part evokes both author Samuel Clemens’ early days as a steamboat pilot (where he got his pen name from a cry measuring the water’s depth) and the iconic raft journey in his novel “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
The only trouble is, TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s new show at Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts isn’t really a Mark Twain musical at all.
Twain is in it, played by Dan Hiatt as the familiar elderly version of Clemens in the cream-colored suit. But he spends much more time standing around listening than talking as the songs take center stage. He occasionally says a few clever words to set a scene or simply tells a few jokes, all taken from his writings, delivered with sharp comedic timing by Hiatt. Still, he’s conspicuously underutilized, at best a witty guest at a hootenanny, even less central than your average emcee.
Created by Randal Myler and Dan Wheetman, the duo behind musical revues “It Ain’t Nothin’ But the Blues” and “Fire on the Mountain” (both of which have played TheatreWorks), the show instead is a sentimental journey around the Mississippi River in the 1800s, full of musical odes to riverboat workers, lumberjacks, farmworkers, gamblers and enslaved people. David Lee Cuthbert’s set suggesting a willow-ringed dock is centered around a large screen showing vintage photographs and songappropriate scenery.
This is the West Coast premiere of a show that debuted in January at Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, but really it’s the unveiling of a new six-performer version of what was originally a three-person cabaret show.
The songs are a mix of rousing traditional folk ditties and a few spirituals, and original folk numbers by Wheetman, who also serves as musical director and sings and plays in the (usually) three-piece band, which sometimes expands as other performers contribute a bit of percussion or something.
Directed by Myler, the show works best when considered simply as a folk music celebration with occasional narration. The songs are lovely and jubilant as played by Wheetman, Chic Street Man and Tony Marcus on a variety of instruments, and often sung by actors Valisia LeKae and Rondrell McCormick in a variety of period personae.
Structurally, the show is a mess. Even in the context of a leisurely tour through various aspects of life around the Mississippi, it often jumps back and forth and revisits topics and settings we just left a few songs ago. There’s no biographical through line — Twain occasionally sets the scene by talking about a period of his life, but mostly the settings speak for themselves, just as often introduced by one of the other performers with a brief snippet of oral history, or sometimes not introduced at all other than by an appropriate projection or two when a song starts.
Near the end there’s a surprisingly long section of conversations from “Huckleberry Finn” interspersed with songs. It’s the only fictional work of Twain’s reflected or even mentioned in the show, and having it suddenly take up so much space is jarring, though it’s wellperformed by LeKae, as a gamely curious young Huck, and McCormick, as the wry and regret-laden Jim, floating off on his escape from slavery.
Most of all, the feel-good tone of the evening is borderline mawkish, a paean to simple working lives of long ago and to the beauty of the muddy Mississippi. Though the show mines Clemens’ writing for a few choice zingers, it’s far too saccharine to feel particularly Twainlike as a whole. There’s plenty of mighty nice music, but there isn’t enough Twain here to justify dragging him into it.