The cost of mounting a live production, Broadway, operatic or otherwise, is so enormous that much glorious music goes unheard simply because it was written for a work that’s rarely produced. Of course you can buy recordings, but there’s nothing like the thrilling immediacy of a live performance. Anyone who’s spent the night on the Great Lawn, staring up at the stars, enraptured by “E Lucevan le stelle” (ah, days gone by! the Met doesn’t come to the Great Lawn anymore), will tell you that stripping away the fancy costumes, the staging and the dance leaves…the music.
It’s for the music that City Center launched the Encores! Great American Musicals In Concert series in 1994 to celebrate rarely heard works by America’s great composers and lyricists. At the series’ inception, an orchestra, singers and actors, all in concertwear, would run through the score in its entirety; for dance numbers, singers and actors would step aside, and the lights would focus on the orchestra to allow the audience to concentrate on…the music. Works by such greats as Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and Kurt Weill were presented thrice every season.
This year’s series began with Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along (book by George Furth), running through Feb. 19. The original 1981 production was a flop, running for only 16 performances. Critics and public alike blamed it on a confusing plot, miscasting and cheesy costumes, but they missed the point: the music is utterly banal. Sondheim is no Weill, and Merrily We Roll Along deserves no place in a series that honors great music.
Somewhere along the way, City Center introduced props, minimal scenery and costumes to Encores!, claiming that the focus still remains on the score. It does not. The original vision has been lost. Worse, rehearsal time is short: just eight days, resulting in a pathetic attempt at a dance number that surely must embarrass those forced to perform it.
On the whole, cast members Colin Donnell, Adam Grupper and Celia Keenan-Bolger deliver predictably competent Broadway performances, Keenan-Bolger occasionally summoning the depths of poignancy her character would have rallied had she appeared in a different musical.
The evening’s bright spot was Lin-Manuel Miranda, composer of In the Heights. As a hip-hop artist, he approached Merrily from a unique perspective, delivering its best number, “Franklin Shepard, Inc.” with a spontaneity and originality Sondheim lacked. Stay original, Miranda. Please.
