Musicals of So Many Moods

Among the adjectives hauled out to describe musicals and music, “dark” and “light” rank with the most misleading. Plenty of difficult, even abrasive shows are shot through with shafts of light and wit. Plenty of easygoing bits of escapism give you that smile, and then--in a flash--they slip you a moment or a song that intoxicates you, powerfully.

In stores at the moment, we have two exceptionally valuable new cast albums: Michael LaChiusa’s “The Wild Party,” a spring 2000 Broadway flop that didn’t deserve its fate, and Stephen Sondheim’s “Saturday Night,” the bulk of which was written in 1954, recently treated to a swell off-Broadway premiere.

Both shows are set in New York in the late 1920s, just before the stock market fell down and went boom. One could be called dark; the other, light.

Both, however--alive and well in these superlative disc versions--defy any one mood, any one color. Their makers had more on their minds than that.

Based on the feverish Joseph Moncure March narrative poem, “The Wild Party” was a 68-performance Broadway casualty, shut out at this year’s Tony Awards. (It closed early last month.) Composer-lyricist LaChiusa and co-librettist and director George C. Wolfe faced a huge challenge in the making of their show.

How could March’s simple setting--a party thrown by vaudeville bump-and-grinder Queenie and her abusive lover, Burrs--expand to suit the demands of the stage? Could it, really? Were these people and their show-biz guests just too “coarse and cheap” for mass consumption, to use a phrase spoken by a cocaine-snorting bisexual among its guest list?

Maybe. Also, LaChiusa and Wolfe never crystallized their central, rather obvious concept--that of the masks people wear to ward off life’s harsh truths. Queenie, played by Toni Collette, receives her redemptive coda when she finally wipes off her “tinted mask of snow”; Burrs, played by a scarily intense Mandy Patinkin, is a Jolson-like blackface entertainer seething with self-loathing.

Beyond that, LaChiusa and Wolfe never fully figured out what to do with the party guests once they brought them together. LaChiusa’s score, a world away from his operatically scaled (and less distinctive) “Marie Christine,” became less potent when going for the big, audience-friendly numbers, such as an Eartha Kitt showstopper (“When It Ends”) or the power ballad “People Like Us.”

Many problems. But make no mistake: The Broadway “Wild Party” had it all over the separate, inferior off-Broadway show of the same name, based on the same tawdry poem. (The cast album of the off-Broadway version is due in stores July 11. Not that I’m recommending it.) The LaChiusa “Wild Party” was really something in its first hour--exciting, decadent, a dreamy nightmare.

Producer Phil Ramone has captured on disc the best of this score. The first dozen or so numbers (many at or under two minutes in length) are inspired, nervous, fragmented, gloriously alive: “Welcome to My Party,” “Breezin’ Through Another Day,” “Uptown” and others, orchestrated in various 1920s inflections by Bruce Coughlin. This is some “rejuvenatin’ jazzin’ ” indeed, as one lyric puts it. And this is one “dark” score, however imperfect, with real zing and buoyancy.

Along with Adam Guettel (“Floyd Collins”) and Jason Robert Brown (“Parade”), LaChiusa often gets lumped in a broad group of contemporary theater songwriters considered “arty” or “noncommercial” or “unmelodic” by their detractors. In other words, he’s considered an heir to the mantle of Sondheim.

So where does “Saturday Night” fit into that equation? Sondheim’s modest, utterly winning score never got onto a stage in the mid-1950s. The musical remains saddled with a glaring story flaw--its protagonist is a foolhardy pain in the butt. On CD, though, you barely feel the pain; you can relax and enjoy the felicitous charms of the score, orchestrated brilliantly by Sondheim’s frequent collaborator, Jonathan Tunick.

“Saturday Night” is based on “Front Porch in Flatbush,” an unproduced play by “Casablanca” screenwriters Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein. Its central character, Gene (David Campbell), works as a runner on Wall Street. He’s eager to make good. He’s also a poseur, the kind of guy who dresses up to the nines and hangs out across the bridge (Brooklyn, that is) at the Plaza Hotel, acting the swell.

The show follows Gene’s exploits in love, and--more annoyingly--his exploits in money, as he invests his friends’ cash in dubious stocks. Gene takes an apartment he can’t possibly afford, turns vaguely sociopathic in Act 2, and generally fouls things up for the gang in Flatbush before things are righted.

Two of the score’s 20 songs are recent additions. Sondheim wrote the conversational (and extremely adroit) “Montana Chem” before the recent pre-New York U.S. premiere in Chicago. Another song--”Delighted, I’m Sure,” with its “Little Things You Do Together” rhythmic accompaniment--existed in the ‘50s only as incidental music. Both were well worth Sondheim’s time and energy. And in their expressions of love and heartache, songs such as the title tune, “All for You” and “So Many People” slip you the mickey. In the nicest way.

** “The Music Man” 2000 Broadway cast album

Q Records/Atlantic

On the new cast album of “The Music Man,” Craig Bierko’s spoken intro to the famous patter song “Trouble” doesn’t just sound like Robert Preston’s version. It really, really, really sounds like it. Homage? Rip-off? A matter of timbre similarity?

All three, probably. Despite a sporadic case of Prestonitis, Bierko’s hard-working but rather smarmy Harold Hill comes off better on disc than he did (early in the run, at least) live on Broadway. The Susan Stroman-directed revival’s chief asset is also this disc’s chief asset: Rebecca Luker as Marian Paroo, whose rich, slightly tense soprano lends an undercurrent of yearning to the songs made famous by Barbara Cook.

The revival’s orchestrations by Doug Besterman remain for me the show’s sticking point. Taking his cue from Stroman’s staging, presumably, the charts are going for a “brighter,” cuter sound than the original Don Walker orchestrations of Meredith Willson’s score. Brighter, however, here ends up sounding merely more pushy, more coy. And who decided to add the snare drum underneath the “Rock Island” opener? Talk about a subtraction in disguise!

Beyond Luker, there’s another reason for chronic devotees of “The Music Man” to check out this new version. It’s a far more complete representation of the score than either the ’57 Broadway or the ’62 film edition. You get lots of dialogue, extended dance passages, the “Ice Cream” lead-in to “Sincere,” the Harold Hill version of “Gary, Indiana” (from the movie), Stroman’s full-cast marching band finale and much more.

There’s a lot you don’t get, though. You don’t get much enough in terms of a genuine, sensitive, distinct musical personality behind the tale of Hill. That’s a disservice to a musical comedy with as much personality, not to mention as sure a sense of period and locale, as anything Broadway’s heard or seen. *