A night mostly for Sondheim devotees
In his curtain speech at the Saturday, March 31, opening night of “Saturday Night,” 42nd Street Moon Co-Executive Director Daren A.C. Carollo called the musical “Stephen Sondheim’s baby pictures.”
The comparison proved apt. That’s not because the show, whose music and lyrics Sondheim wrote when he was 23, is embarrassing, as baby pictures or early artistic endeavors might be for the rest of us. Rather, it’s because “Saturday Night” is most interesting from an academic
point of view, as biographical context that might help us see whence came a singular musical theater genius.
Occasionally, the show rewards such inquiry. As it chronicles a gang of Brooklyn boys looking for weekend kicks in 1929, you catch glimmers of what would become Sondheim’s signatures. A chord resolves only in its refusal to resolve. A rhythm hopscotches anywhere but on the beats. One lyric simultaneously submerges a character deep into a pool of feeling while also preserving his wry detachment from it. Another humanizes the wastrel Gene (Nikita Burshteyn), encapsulating with remarkable economy who he is and what makes him empathetic: “I don’t want to be what I am. I want to be what I can.”
If you’re not a Sondheim aficionado, though, “Saturday Night” can be trying entertainment. The show’s mainspring and title song amounts to little more than a kvetch. Ted (Jesse Cortez), Artie (Mike Birr), Ray (Jack O’Reilly) and Dino (Nathaniel Rothrock) are looking for dates: “When you’re alone on a Saturday night, you might as well be dead.”
But then almost as soon as that opening number is over, they reveal that they don’t actually want to spend any money on going out. It’s a little bit like complaining that you never go on vacation, and then in the same breath complaining about how hard it is to leave your house. What a sob story.
Julius J. Epstein’s book, adapted from the play “Front Porch in Flatbush,” which he co-wrote with his brother Philip G. Epstein, suffers from muddled logic throughout. Why does everyone adore Gene and continuously rally around him, when all he does is take their money and squander it in the stock market or worse, while simultaneously looking down his nose at their plebeian origins? Why does Helen (Amie Shapiro) fall for Gene, when he insults her wardrobe and lies to the whole neighborhood about getting engaged to her?
Ryan Weible’s direction does little to remedy these flaws. When Helen and Gene supposedly fall for each other, they’re so devoid of spark you can’t help but wonder if they in fact have evil designs on each other. Staging often defaults to a horizontal line of nine bodies rooted in place; you’re more conscious of the actors as obstacles taking up space on the stage than as the tools that are supposed to activate it. Singers stretch their pitches; some voices sound partially trapped in the larynx.
One standout in the show is Bethany Deal’s costume design. Clothing one of the fellas in a combination of argyles, plaid and a tie with mandalas, she imbues him with more personality than the script or the music does. Without that touch, he’d be as faceless as the show.