'The Fortress of Solitude': Music Is King in Adaptation of Jonathan Lethem's Best-Selling Novel

The Fortress of Solitude Cast Members
Photo by Doug Hamilton

Music is king in the adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s sprawling coming-of-age novel, The Fortress of Solitude, opening tonight at the Public Theater. 

Imagine a really good jukebox musical, but one with all new, creative and original tunes that set the mood and propel the plot, and you will have a sense of the remarkable job that composer/lyricist Michael Friedman and playwright Itamar Moses’s have done. 

Almost completely sung through, The Fortress of Solitude comes jam packed with every style imaginable of music that succeeds in capturing the emotional touchstones of the 70s, 80s, and 90s: rock, rhythm and blues, soul, gospel, folk, punk, funk, pop ballads, and rap. 

Fans of musical theater may well be reminded of Dreamgirls, Hair, Rent, and In The Heights as its progenitors, and you will find yourself bombarded with more cultural references than you’ll come across in a Stephen King novel.

Yet it is a tribute to its creators—not to mention its director Daniel Aukin, choreographer Camille A. Brown, and the outstanding cast—that The Fortress of Solitude earns its place in the sun without feeling like it comes coasting in on easy nostalgia.           

Just as Lin-Manuel Miranda did with In The Heights, where the wonderfully diverse neighborhood of Washington Heights took center stage, the setting of The Fortress of Solitude is of utmost importance to the telling of the stories of two boys—one white, one of mixed race, and both named for musical icons—Dylan (Adam Chanler-Berat), and Mingus (Kyle Beltran).     

Dylan, a quiet nerdy white kid of 12, has been ripped from his roots in monochromatic, monocultural Berkeley, California and has been plunked down in what he finds to be a very scary world of the distinctly downscale Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn.  At his mother’s insistence, the family has relocated in order to keep their son from growing up without having had the experience of living in a culturally, racially, and ethnically mixed community. But Mom (Kristen Sieh), having done her duty to her son’s  upbringing, succumbs to some California dreamin’ of her own and leaves him with his casually inattentive father (Ken Barnett) and to his own devices.    

Act I is largely Dylan’s story, and the musical does a splendid job of capturing the angst of someone living through a painful and lonely early adolescence. He must  figure out how to negotiate the neighborhood and its assorted denizens, including Robert, the requisite bully (Brian Tyree Henry). The closest he has to a friend is the annoying, whiny, and even more nerdy Arthur (David Rossmer), who goes nowhere without his beloved chessboard.

Then Dylan meets Mingus, who has the self-assured survival skills that Dylan craves, and it’s love at first sight. The boys bonding is solidified through a shared appreciation of comic books, a flair for graffiti tagging, and the common experience of being raised without a mother. Both thrive under the watchful eye of Mingus’s father, Barrett Rude Junior (Kevin Mambo), former lead singer for a R&B group called the Subtle Distinctions, who takes Dylan under his wing. 

Gradually, though, things fall apart, not through any quarrel but through the normal drifting apart that occurs when we fail to pay attention. Dylan goes off to the academically elite Stuyvesant High School, leaving Mingus behind to deal with the mean streets, epitomized by the appearance of his malevolent and dangerous grandfather, Barrett Rude Senior (André de Shields). 

With Act II, we have entered the 1990s.  Now grown, Dylan is a successful music critic living back in California. He has returned to Brooklyn for a short visit to solidify a deal to release a collection of the Subtle Distinctions’ music, his way of thanking Mingus’s father. The Brooklyn he returns to, however, is not the one he remembers. Instead, it is in the process of gentrifying, and even though he gets to see some of his old companions, things are just not the same, and he is struck by the truth behind the cliché: “you can’t go home again.” Nothing is frozen in time, and even the left-behinds have moved on to follow their own destinies. 

The transition between Act I and Act II is a bit bumpy. Where Act I is deeply rewarding and emotionally honest, the tone of Act II is more distancing. The adult Dylan is far less interesting than the boy had been, and the emotional core has shifted to the story of Barrett Rude Junior.

That story deserves the spotlight of a full show of its own, especially as it reveals itself through Kevin Mambo’s masterful portrayal of a man on the verge of superstardom who is all but crushed by life’s harsh blows, including the violence, drugs, and racism that seem to be unavoidable within the territory he has inherited. He is trapped, along with his much-loved and now-lost son Mingus.    

There are times when the dropped cultural references pile up more deeply than necessary (I now have an earworm of Talking Heads’ Once In A Lifetime playing endlessly in my brain), and it can be a challenge to keep up with all of the main stories and side stories that pull you along like a whirlwind, but The Fortress of Solitude is a powerhouse of a musical with richly drawn characters who will stick with you for a very long time.     

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Modern Love Among the Scientific Set

Aubrey Dollar and Karl Miller "meet cute" in grad school

Relationships are complicated.

This is true whether the relationships are between two yeast molecules or two human beings. 

That’s sort of the message of Completeness, Itamar Moses’s new play that is alternately romantic, comic, intellectually intriguing, and, occasionally, too clever for its own good. 

Completeness, now on view at Playwrights Horizons, begins as two attractive and bright graduate students—she a molecular biologist, he a computer scientist—meet cute in a computer lab on campus and begin a hot romance that mirrors the work they are doing both individually and collectively.

Karl Miller, a fine young actor full of goofy charm, is Elliot, the computer scientist whose short-term goal is to crack the “Traveling Salesman Problem,” the elusive holy grail of his field.  (It’s real; look it up and you’ll learn, among other things, that it is “an NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimization.”) 

As soon as he eyes Molly, winningly played by Aubrey Dollar, you can almost hear Elliot’s heart (among other parts of his anatomy) go “boing,” In order to hook up with her, Elliot gladly sets aside his maybe-not-so-urgent-after-all work and offers to help her devise a shortcut to study potentially significant interactions among yeast molecules.  For her, he will develop an algorithm or computer model that will save her the trouble of examining each and every interaction, by identifying those that are likely to produce the kinds of results worthy of her efforts.

As you can see, neither Elliot nor Molly considers the old painstaking methods of their fields to be worth their time.  “Life is short” is their credo, which they apply equally to scientific studies and to personal matters.

Because Elliot and Molly make such a lovely couple, in the way that we have come to expect from exposure to too many on-screen romantic comedies, we do expect them to somehow evolve into some modern day version of Marie and Pierre Curie.  But life rarely imitates the movies, and we learn quickly enough to set aside such fantasies for the reality of modern romance, consisting of speed dating and short-term relationships. 

Thus it is with Elliot and Molly.   They are like the fruit flies that geneticists like to study because they play out their lives in about a month.   On human terms it looks like this:  meet someone, take up with them, edge toward the possibility of something more permanent, and then end it—and begin again. 

In between, we learn an awful lot about both computer science and molecular biology.  The playwright has done a masterful job of explaining the science (data mining and derivation errors, anyone?), and the actors have done a terrific job of learning to spout the complicated lingo so that it sounds second nature to them. 

If the juxtapositioning of conceptual science and human foibles reminds you of something Tom Stoppard might have cooked up, it’s not a coincidence.  Itamar Moses and Mr. Stoppard have a bit of a mutual admiration society going, and the latter even wrote the preface for the published edition of Moses’s earlier Bach at Leipzig.  The scientific conversations in Completeness are very reminiscent of the discussions about mathematics in Stoppard’s Arcadia and about quantum physics in Hapgood.   There are worse role models for Mr. Moses to have, though one hopes he will eventually find his own unique voice. 

Lest I leave you with the impression that Completeness is a two-character play, I hasten to add that there are actually several others, various former or waiting-in-the-wings partners of Molly and Elliot, all portrayed by Brian Avers and Meredith Forlenza.  Whether it is the fault of the playwright or of the director, Pam MacKinnon (she has directed a production of Bach at Leipzig, so Moses is not new to her), it is very difficult to differentiate among the other characters who flit in and out—though perhaps they are intentionally non-distinguishable. 

There is also a bit of breaking of the fourth wall that doesn’t seem to serve much purpose, except, possibly, to remind us that science allows us to control things just so much, but that life is ultimately unpredictable in its variability.

Feel free to tell your friends about this blog, and to share your own theater stories by posting a comment.