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Also this issue: The Music Man ICE, Baby Camping Trip Artsbeat To Sir, With Love |
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June 27-July 3, 2002
theater
 SHEâS GOT A HEADACHE: In the title role, Cherry Jones organizes a sex strike in Lysistrata. |
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LysistrataThrough June 30, Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-569-9700
Cult musical fans often dine out on tales of turbulent artistic gestation. I wonder … what will they make of Lysistrata, a new musical adaptation of Aristophanes’ classic sex comedy? Before arriving on stage, the show went through two librettists and three songwriting teams.
The first book writer, Larry Gelbart, seemed ideal -- his script for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum remains a model of the genre. Now the “adaptor” is Robert Brustein, a brilliant scholar and theoretician, but a spottier director and (more important) not a playwright. Lysistrata’s originally announced songwriting team -- the classy Arnold Weinstein and William Bolcom -- gave way to the more commercial David Zippel and Alan Menken. What we ultimately have is lyrics by the little-known Matty Selman, and music by Galt MacDermot, whose best-known work, Hair, premiered over three decades ago.
In other words, the changes don’t look like improvements. It would be reasonable to enter the theater fearing a show that’s in creative free-fall.
As it happens, things are not quite that bad, though for the first 40 minutes it seems like they will be. Lysistrata opens with a Motown-style girl trio, functioning as a flyweight Greek chorus. Sadly this sets the tone for the evening’s biggest disappointment: MacDermot’s score, which retains his characteristic ’60s beat, but has no distinguished music. There’s vamping of the sort heard in Hair, but we wait in vain for a song even as good as the worst of that show. (Selman’s lyrics are occasionally clever, but more often puerile.)
Nor do things improve with the arrival of the women. Aristophanes provides a dream set-up -- Lysistrata masterminds a reluctant agreement by the women of Athens and Sparta to withhold sex until their husbands give up war -- and I would have thought it a nearly impossible scene to ruin. Here, however, it’s manhandled by Brustein and director Andrei Serban into something that looks like the infamous Otto Titsling number from Beaches. There’s vulgarity without wit or charm, and more than a touch of misogyny. As Lysistrata, Cherry Jones, one of our finest stage actresses, has been encouraged to mug and stare at the audience like Beatrice Arthur (and though she has a fair singing voice, she has no decent material to show it off). The rest of the female ensemble are grotesquely costumed, and they overact as though in a community theater show.
Paradoxically, Lysistrata, sometimes thought of as the first women’s play, gets better when the men arrive. They too are coached to comic stereotypes, but it’s more effective for these less-important characters, and we get the only three performances of distinction: Thomas Derrah (Helion), Will LeBow (President of the Athenian Senate) and Benjamin Evett (Kinesias). Serban also does some imaginative staging in the last few scenes.
At best, this Lysistrata is a mixed bag, and not something for general audiences. Indeed, it was conceived as a gala theatrical farewell for Robert Brustein, who this year retires from the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., which he founded 23 years ago. The show plays as a party piece, full of in-jokes, like the fact that the action is set 23 years into the Peloponnesian War. Even the coarse, amateurish acting style trades on a sense that it’s fun for fans of Cherry Jones (regarded in some circles as a living saint) to watch her shed her beatific image and go for a lewd punch line.
But you know how it is with private events. What’s fun for your friends is dull and uncomfortable for everybody else. With all the talent on parade, it might have seemed a good idea for the Prince to co-produce Lysistrata and share the bounty. But trust me -- it’s not a show with a future. The party’s over.
