For what it's worth, my thoughts/review from the Cincinnati production, which may address at least some of your questions, and probably give you way too much at the same time:
The story is about love, marriage, friendship, commitment, intimacy—five married couples and the third wheel around which they all orbit: Robert, the placid, passive perpetual bachelor. And although each couple ostensibly pushes him to "grow up" and find a wife, they all have their reasons for wanting the opposite: so he'll be available to them when they need him, as friend, confidante, babysitter, potential lover, the stand-in for the life they've chosen not to lead themselves. Stay as you are, they're thinking, precisely because we didn't. It’s an interesting take, because it makes Robert the natural set piece while also making him the reactor, and a cipher: he is what everybody else imagines him to be, at least until the very end, when he breaks free and, both literally and figuratively, locks them all out.
The whole actors-as-orchestra didn’t work as well here as it does with Sweeney, I think, because the instruments aren’t as organically integrated with the characters. In Sweeney, Mrs. Lovett plays a tuba because she is a tuba: loud, brassy, gauche. It's a natural extension of who she is. I didn’t get the same sense of that here, and the assignments felt a little random. But it adds an interesting layer nonetheless, and plays into the construction of the fully self-contained world that these people inhabit: they are all about themselves (as, come on, aren’t we all?).
It's updated to a modern setting, and the stage is spare: just the barest outlines of an apartment, with a piano, a traveling wet bar, clear lucite blocks that function as ottomans, and an enormous plaster column in the center that probably functions as some sort of phallic reference, although I don't like reading too much into that kind of thing because, well, who cares anymore? Everything's a phallic reference, isn't it? Costumes are black, contemporary. Ordinary. Altogether it was like sitting on a sofa at a very smart cocktail party.
Caveat: it would be nice if they could find someone who will not play Joanne as "Elaine Stritch playing Joanne," because it can't be done. Elaine Stritch can do strident because she can make it funny, simply because she can't not make it funny; Barbara Walsh just made her even more strident, which is neither funny nor terribly watchable. (Updated caveat: from what I've heard, they're picking up the entire Cincinnati cast.)
But certainly the GORGEOUS Raúl Esparza as Robert has the credentials, the charisma, and the talent to pull it off while making himself a big, big, huge star at the same time. He’s simultaneously GORGEOUS, confident, confused, exhausted, bored, and terrified. If nothing else, his first act closer of "Marry Me a Little" has got to be recorded: it’s lonely and lovely and haunting, and not a little mean. The fact that it was cut from the original production qualifies as a serious crime, I think, because it’s what the show is all about: sheer, petrified ambivalence about everything you give up in a marriage, and everything you gain that just might make it worthwhile.
Updated On: 8/5/06 at 09:42 PM
