The Wayback Machine
23 August 2006

Two Broadway blockbusters offer more than just nostalgia

Same Old Line: A Chorus Line's restaged choreography feels dated.

On Carole Shorenstein Hays remembers standing in line outside the Curran Theatre to catch A Chorus Line when it arrived in San Francisco in May 1976 from its triumphal Broadway run. "I was so full of excitement," she recalls. "The anticipation was explosive." The same could be said of the atmosphere outside the Curran earlier this month, when the lauded theater owner and producer debuted the new Broadway-bound revival of the hit musical about a group of high-kicking hopefuls trying to make it through a cutthroat audition. I, for one, have never felt such tremors of expectation on Geary Street, and the sensation had nothing to do with the magnitude 4.5 earthquake that rumbled through Northern California that night.

Nostalgia is one of musical theater's all-consuming passions. As with most revivals — and Broadway has seen many in recent years, from Chicago to Cabaret — the present incarnation of A Chorus Line capitalizes on our love for an old show tune, more often than not first heard in our youth. But a musical doesn't have to demonstrate its age to flaunt a rose-tinted view of history: Even new examples of the form are feeding the nostalgia habit. Take last year's multiple-Tony-Award-winning The Light in the Piazza, for instance. Playing at the Orpheum Theatre — another Shorenstein Hays venue — on the first leg of a national tour, this romantic musical, concerning an American mother and daughter's travels through Italy in the early 1950s, yearns for a storybook past. In its presentation of a world in which the women look pretty and demure, the men look determined and handsome, and everyone looks like he stepped off the set of Roman Holiday, Piazza illustrates that the art form is one of this country's prime mediums for cultural mythmaking.

The nostalgia factor works in different ways in A Chorus Line and The Light in the Piazza. With A Chorus Line, it's in the faithful reconstruction of the original — which grew to become the longest-running Broadway musical of its day. I never saw the 1975 version, but judging by reviews and production images, it appears that little has changed in the intervening years. The restaging of Bob Avian's original choreography, with its repetitive and unexceptional kicks, drag runs, and leaps, feels dated. Lacking the distraction of flashy costumes, sets, and lights (Robin Wagner's bare-bones scenic design features little more than an empty space framed by a revolving mirrored wall), I found myself wanting more innovative choreography. Furthermore, while references to gonorrhea, homosexuality, and plastic surgery might have been shocking when the musical debuted, they barely register on the risqué meter today.

Piazza's version of nostalgia, meanwhile, lies in its reconstruction of a mythic past — a romanticized, mid-20th-century American view of European culture as conveyed by the passion between a wealthy young American woman, Clara Johnson, and Fabrizio Naccarelli, an Italian youth. Now, everyone enjoys a good love story, but the way in which this musical reduces the Italian characters to idealized cliches (the "Mamma mia"s, the histrionics, the infidelities) makes it hard for a modern audience to take Spencer's bicultural relationship seriously. The show's narrative power is further undercut by its portrayal of Clara. This 26-year-old character is supposed to have the mind of a child, but the musical — more interested in painting a prettified myth than gritty reality — presents her as a beautiful, poised woman. That composer and lyricist Adam Guettel is the grandson of songwriting giant Richard Rodgers further ornaments the show's reverence for the past.

That being said, it's not like I walked away from either production feeling like I'd been locked in a cobwebbed closet with nothing but a pair of frayed legwarmers and the summer 1953 issue of Italian Vogue to console me. The audience's excitement was enough to carry me through A Chorus Line even though, at two hours and 15 minutes without intermission, the production felt a few step-kick-step-repeats too long. The movements are crisp, the singing vital, and each character as colorful as costume designer Theoni V. Aldredge's natty, 1970s-era leotards and bandanas. The comic numbers among composer Marvin Hamlisch and lyricist Edward Kleban's songs are particularly strong. As married couple Kristine and Al, Chryssie Whitehead and Tony Yazbeck complete each other's sentences with hilarious precision, giving the duet "Sing!" a goofy appeal. Natalie Cortez's performance, as Diana, of "Nothing," a pithy ditty about Method acting, evokes images of a frustrated drama student struggling to personify an ice-cream cone. And Jessica Lee Goldyn's bawdy refrain of "tits and ass" in the song "Dance: Ten; Looks: Three" is especially pertinent in our post-Pamela Anderson era.

The Light in the Piazza is equally appealing, not least for its visual beauty. If a Greek sculptor chiseled Spencer's characters out of marble and stuck them on pedestals, the statues would no doubt resemble these particular actors. With his lean musculature, olive skin, and dark, wavy hair, David Burnham makes the perfect Fabrizio. Christine Andreas' graceful, stately Margaret Johnson looks like a Good Housekeeping cover model, and Elena Shaddow's Clara is the sort of girl about whom Buddy Holly might have written a song. Lighting designer Christopher Akerlind's soulful play of shadow and light and Michael Yeargan's gliding Italianate sets — with their picturesquely run-down façades and oversized reproductions of artworks — keep the eye engrossed while mirroring the fluctuating passions of the characters. And then there's Guettel's voluptuous score, with its soaring string lines accented with marimba, harp, and woodwind.

While the remounting of A Chorus Line and the perfumed vision of American-Italian postwar relations in The Light in the Piazza play to audiences' longing for a past that never really existed, there are moments in both musicals that connect powerfully with even the most cynical of modern spectators. For Shorenstein Hays, reviving A Chorus Line is as much about reclaiming the past as it is about bringing the work to a new generation. "It's all about getting back to our roots," she says. "It reminds us that back when the musical first came out, you did theater because it was your calling." In this era of spectacular Disneyfied mega-musicals, it's important to see a show like A Chorus Line, which relies almost exclusively on the performers' dancing and singing skills, even if the choreography itself seems a bit musty. Meanwhile, the dissonance in The Light in the Piazza between Guettel's lavish score and the sense of things being not quite right in paradise (the state of Mrs. Johnson's marriage, her daughter's "condition," the difficulties of cross-cultural communication) give the work a darkly contemporary outlook.

It's possible to hear more in Piazza than Rodgers and Hart channeling Puccini. And today's audience can get something out of A Chorus Line besides a desire to watch reruns of Fame. But discovering these qualities demands ignoring the hype long enough to see beyond the wistfulness.

A Chorus Line

Directed By:
Bob Avian
Starring:
Michael Berresse and Charlotte d'Amboise
Where:
Curran Theatre, 445 Geary (between Taylor and Mason), S.F.

The Light in the Piazza

Directed By:
Bartlett Sher
Starring:
Christine Andreas, David Burnham, and Elena Shaddow
Where:
The Orpheum Theatre, 1192 Market (at Eighth St.), S.F.
Written By:
James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante,Conceived by Michael Bennett
and Craig Lucas