SORTA STEPHEN SONDHEIM
A mashed-up musical that works about as well as it could
It’s all duologues at the Tarragon. In the Extra Space, there’s the all-talking Lungs; on the main stage the all-singing, and sometimes-dancing, Marry Me a Little, which is a sort of Stephen Sondheim musical.
Sort of, because though Sondheim gave the show his blessing, he had nothing to do with its creation. It’s a cross between a story-show and an anthology, assembled offBroadway in 1981 by Craig Lucas (later a successful dramatist in his own right) and Norman Rene from songs written for Sondheim musicals that had never reached the stage or cut from shows that had. The conceit that bound the songs together involved a young man and a young woman both living in the same apartment building but each unaware of the other’s existence. Alive and alone on a Saturday night (title number of Sondheim’s first and, in 1981, still unproduced musical) each fantasizes about a relationship with an imaginary other … and you can probably guess the rest. Their fantasies interlock, a development made scenically easier by the fact that their landlord has apparently supplied them with identical rooms; one set does duty for both, so that each character can invade the other’s space without the audience worrying about where they’re supposed to be.
Declaration of interest: I directed the British première of this show, a couple of years after the American one, so I find it hard to shake my own preconceptions of how it should go. As regards this production: I admire the inventiveness of Adam Brazier’s staging, and envy him Ken MacDonald’s set which, without raising the characters out of their struggling financial league, is far more detailed and welcoming than the one we came up with in London. I quarrel, though, with what I take to be his concept.
In this version the boy-girl fantasy is, as far as I can tell, all the boy’s. There’s a keyboard in his apartment, and he seems to be an aspiring composer-lyricist. Two songs in, there’s a knock on his door; it’s the girl (whom we’ve already seen and heard in her own environment, but won’t again) come for an audition. She leaves, then comes back, and he sets about getting her into his pullout bed. Their romance shows promise, but falls victim to their conflicting fears and expectations. They end up bitter-sweetly accepting that, in the words of their closing number (one of many heartbreakingly deleted numbers from Follies) “it wasn’t meant to happen.”
Making this essentially the guy’s story spoils the symmetry. Given that, there’s a lot to enjoy. Brazier and his choreographer, Linda Garneau, have gone vigorously for narrative and conflict. Even solo songs are confrontational rather than contemplative. This works spectacularly well with the title number, one of the discarded trial-runs for what eventually became Being Alive, in Company. Elodie Gillett sings its passionate plea for a dispassionate relationship right in her partner’s face and all over his bed, thereby heightening both its desperation and its unreality. Less happy is the decision to give the same treatment to Adrian Marchuk’s performance of the succeeding song Happily Ever After, another lapsed candidate for the same spot in Company. Sung as a soliloquy, its rejection of any kind of commitment can seem painfully honest; flung directly at a possible lover, it just sounds cruel and insensitive, with its singer coming off as a jerk. (He’s already spent a lot of stage time getting out of his pants as a hopeful prelude to getting into hers.)
Making every song a duet, virtual or actual, has other
The score of Marry Me a Little has always been a mutable thing, with directors allowed to add or delete
downsides. Some songs get sung in counterpoint before having a chance to establish themselves in their own right; Who Could Be Blue, another cut treasure from Follies and a melody whose simplicity and serenity are worthy of Jerome Kern, is especially shortchanged. But we get to hear a lot of lovely music; my favourite has always been, and remains, the exquisitely yearning All Things Bright and Beautiful, yet another cut-out from Follies (and still there, instrumentally, as part of its opening music.) The score of Marry Me has always been a mutable thing, with directors allowed to add to, or delete from, the original tune-stack. This production lets us hear something new: Rainbows, a song written for the forthcoming movie of Into the Woods but apparently cut from it, thus validating its right to be here. A recurrent bleating tone mars the performances of both Marchuk and Gillet; other than that, they’re both fine singers, and even better acting singers; Gillet, especially, is transformed when she gets dramatically invested in a song. Paul Sportelli’s musical direction is, as usual, perfect.
Duets are the fashion of the day beyond the Tarragon. Indeed, Marry Me a Little sometimes seems like the recent Venus in Fur with music but without revenge. The Volcano company has revived Daniel MacIvor’s A Beautiful View, the story of two women whose long fractious friendship is highlighted by a sexual encounter which each enters into in the belief that it’s the other who’s really the lesbian. This remains a teasing, elegant piece, in both style and structure. Ross Manson’s production is excellently inhabited by Amy Rutherford, cool and powerful as the waitress who claims to be a bartender and Becky Johnson, rash and shy and gangling as the ukulele-player who claims to have a band and who wears a nervous grin and long socks with stripes at the top. (She wears other things too, but those are what you notice). This isn’t a musical, but Johnson does have a delightful sung interlude. The production’s camping-ground conclusion, though, loses out to the author’s original staging as regards being scare-ish and bearish.