"...a bravura performance...brilliantly staged..."

THE HUMAN COMEDY
Music by Galt MacDermot
Libretto by William Dumaresq
From the story by William Saroyan
Choreographed by Lara Teeter
Directed by Julianne Boyd

June 24 -- July 16
Koussevitzky Arts Center
Berkshire Community College, Pittsfield

June 29, 2006 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

This week’s New Yorker magazine announces that Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which during his lifetime he would never permit being set to music, has finally been freed by his estate for translation into an opera by Ned Rorem and is currently playing in nearby New York State.

Despite the success that was achieved by a musical version of Wilder’s The Match Maker - (Hello Dolly), as playwright he had strong feelings that Our Town’s understated and delicately nuanced evocation of small town on a bare stage was better left alone, that the gentle, but oh so real characters were all we needed, and their lives have continued to evoke moods and emotions in the 60 years of revivals of the play—as written.

Thus, the dynamic, well directed, innovatively staged version of William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy will elicit a variety of responses.

The setting is marvelous. As one waits for the play to begin, a great license plate, California 1943, hangs across the stage, temporarily hiding the large orchestra seated behind and above the playing area. When the lights come up on the play, the plate soars up into the grid and the entire company of twenty one appears on stage for a very active and rousing introduction to the little town in which the play takes place.

The gusto of this opening and the dynamic music may startle nostalgic Saroyan readers, but it is followed immediately by the wonderful moment, brilliantly staged, in which the child Ulysses (Eamon Foley) waves to the trainman (Andre Garner) at the Train Crossing. This moment, repeated with slight variation at the end of the second act, frames the play poignantly, and introduces the youngest member of the little wartime family, the Macauleys—widowed mother of four, the oldest already away on active war-time duty.

One of the great strengths of the script is its evocation of a time in America when everyone felt the duty to sacrifice, to share, to support a war they felt must be fought. The contrast with today’s attitudes is shockingly apparent, and the loss of simple virtues and values of that earlier time is brought home tellingly by Julianne Boyd’s direction and staging. Thus nostalgia for values, lost beyond recall in our selfish modern world, take on greater resonance as do our current attitudes to a war which many deem unwise and unnecessary.

The entire play is sung, in solos, duets, and large company numbers. Galt MacDermot uses every imaginable type of 20th century music to present William Dumaresq’s libretto, including gospel, rock, folk, country, and jazz. The composer wanted a big band effect and this production supplies it with an orchestra of 9 talented musicians.

So, this is the musical story of one courageous little family, one little town, and a world in which war news arrives by telegram, cruelly slow. A world hard to remember in our wired age, but one missed sadly miss by those old enough to have known it.

The play has many strengths, but seems to have been never, or infrequently re-staged since its initial run in NYC in 1984. The strengths are there in this production with exactly right period costumes, a multilevel stage with two key locations, the Macauley family home and the telegraph office (where all the news is bad) sliding in and out on demand.

And yet one can see why Wilder worried about a musical Our Town with all the plot being sung.

Audience members were confused by the meaning of the woman in white (Cheryl Freeman) who appeared on the program as Beautiful Music and led the company in the absolutely beautiful song of the same name.

And the vital plot information concerning the relationship of the orphaned soldier Tobey (Adam Sansiveri) and Marcus Macauley (Heath Calvert) was blurred by its being staged with so many soldiers at the debarkation center. This relationship is vital to the play’s ending and its themes - embracing, loving, caring, and sharing.

However, this is mainly a bravura performance with much to praise. Debby Boone as mother of the valiant little family is poignant, especially in scenes with her youngest child Ulysses, and in songs such as “The World is Full of Loneliness” and “Long Past Sunset,” the latter, an act two reprise of her son Marcus’ beautiful singing of it in act one.

The relationship between Mr. Grogan (Donald Grady) and young Homer (Bobby List) in the telegraph office is played movingly; Grogan is almost a surrogate father to the young boy who quails at the telegraphs of death he must deliver.

And Megan Louis' rendering of “I’ll always love you,” when she must accept the news of Marcus’ death, moves one to cry right along with the singer.

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