If ever a show needed to be John Doyle-ized, it’s Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s 1951 musical Paint Your Wagon, now having a brief run as part of the Encores! season at City Center.
Doyle, of course, is a director known for his stripped-down
versions of Sweeney Todd, Company, and Allegro, among others. He has nothing to do with the Paint Your
Wagon revival, of course (Marc Bruni is doing the honors at Encores!), but his
ability to tame lavish productions to get at their essence—including having the
acting company double as musicians—would do this musical a world of good.
Lerner and Loewe, coming off their lushly-scored hit musical
Brigadoon, switched gears entirely with this earthy tale about the dreamers and drifters who pinned their hopes on the California Gold
Rush of the mid-1800s. The theme is set with the opening
song, “I’m On My Way”:
Where
am I goin’
I
don’t know
Where
am I headin’
I
ain’t certain
All
that I know is I am on my way
The song is performed by a male chorus that includes stock
American characters and recent immigrants from various European countries. It perfectly captures the sense of men
adrift.
One of these is Ben Rumson, a grizzled ‘49er who stumbles
across a vein of gold, stakes a claim, and establishes the town of Rumson Creek
somewhere in Northern California, where he is quickly joined by the other gold-seeking men. The
only female in town is Rumson’s 16-year-old daughter Jennifer. The plot, such as it is, has two central storylines. One follows Rumson and the men. The other follows Jennifer, who falls in love
with Julio, a handsome young miner pressured to live alone outside of town, treated as an outcast
because he is Mexican. Added to the mix is a separate off-the-wall thread that has to
do with a newcomer, Elizabeth, one of two wives of a Mormon man who auctions her off to the highest bidder.
Paint Your Wagon is not exactly a well-plotted tale (Lerner
wrote the book as well as the lyrics to Loewe’s music), but it does have some
interesting elements, including a cross-ethnic love story, broaching the
theme of prejudice that Rodgers and Hammerstein made central to their glorious
South Pacific (1949), and a character (Elizabeth), who bears a resemblance to
the same pair’s Ado Annie from Oklahoma (1943).
What rescues Paint Your Wagon from its clunky and at least
partly derivative storyline are a plethora of catchy and memorable songs that
have withstood the test of time (“I Talk To The Trees,” “They Call The Wind
Maria,” “Wand’rin' Star”) and that fit the characters to a T. What they don’t fit, however, is the outsize
production or Ted Royal’s original (i. e. from 1951) orchestrations, though I
hasten to praise the on-stage orchestra which does a splendid job of performing the score under Rob Berman’s always-masterful direction.
The songs—in keeping with the rough-hewn characters—are
carefully crafted so as to follow a simple and easy-going structure. They cry
out to be accompanied by banjos and guitars (these instruments occasionally
appear in this production, but, alas, only for moments at a time) rather than a
large theater orchestra performing lush and complex orchestrations. On top of
that, choreographer Denis Jones has taken a cue from Agnes de Mille’s original
work, and so there are a several balletic dance numbers that--as nicely performed as they are--ill suit the production, which, after all, features a stage full of
scruffy men for most of the time.
There are, to be fair, a couple of lovely ballads,
including “I Still See Elisa,” which Rumson sings about his late wife, and the duet for Julio and Jennifer, “Carino Mio.” For these, a more lushly romantic arrangement
makes sense. There is also a fun and raucous opening
to Act II, featuring a troop of gals who have been brought to town to entertain the men
in the saloon, performing the bouncy “Hand Me Down That Can O’ Beans,” followed by
“Can-Can.” Here it makes sense to open
up the production. But for much of the
show, things ought to be focused on the individual characters, whose solitary,
rootless lives gnaw at them (“Now I’m lost, so gol-durned lost, not even God
can find me” is a powerful lyric that needs to be sung against a very quiet accompaniment).
Regardless of the cross-purposes facing the production, there are standouts among the cast at Encores! These include Keith Carradine as
Rumson, Justin Guarini at Julio, and Jenni Barber in the comic role
of Elizabeth, who is unfazed at the prospect of being auctioned off and who later happily runs away with one of the men.
Certainly there are many who will be taken by the production
values and the grand orchestrations. But if you were to strip a lot of that away, you would find an intimate musical about a group of society's rejects, the kind who will always be
seeking to fill the holes in their lives by searching for the ever-elusive pot of
gold.
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