I caught the third performance (on June 27th) of "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" at the Goodman. I believe anyone who was captured by the John Berendt love letter to Savannah, as I was, is going to come away from this new musical completely mystified. "Misinterpretation of the Garden of Good and Evil" would honestly be a more apt title of this desecration of a book which captured America's imagination enough to stay on the New York Times bestseller list for more than four years.
Somehow the creatives here have missed essential themes of the book, most notably that Savannah the city (and its citizens included) thrive as characters due to their pride in isolating themselves away from the rest of the world; they cling to traditions rooted in the past: sometimes thriving because of this and sometimes rotting with age. "Society" is still a thing and discussed in the local newspapers, debutante balls still take place, and attitudes toward money and race have evolved little over many, many decades.
Here the show ends with a "huzzah" to a tuneless song called "Butterflies" extolling diversity and inclusivity. Jim Williams, the home and antiques restorer, central to the book, who delighted in his "in and out" list for his most exclusive of Christmas parties, is obviously rolling in his grave at such delusional thought.
Characters from Berendt's novel who would seemingly scream out for inclusion in a musical version of this musical, like piano player/lawyer/con-artist Joe Odom, or Emma Kelly the "Lady of Six Thousand Songs," are MIA. Instead characters are often mashed together such as Sierra Boggess taking on the role of "Emma Dawes" a combination of the real life Lee and Emma Adler, neighbors and political and social rivals of Jim Williams, whom detested each other. But the part of "Emma Dawes" is basically used here as minor comic villain who is never a true thorn in William's side Or they creatives make up a character out of whole cloth, such as "Jack the One Eyed Jill," for no discernible reason other than perhaps the writers felt they needed a foil to play opposite the largely expanded character of The Lady Chablis.
And while Chablis is a stand out minor character in the book, here she is turned into the emcee. Not an emcee, "Cabaret" style, peeling back the curtain to cunningly shine a spotlight on the darkness the source material screams out for, but alas as the "life of the party" stereotypical "I Will Survive" drag diva lifted from an era of "Ru Paul's Drag Race" rather than from the darker days of the Deep South in the 1980's when AIDS was a death sentence and deadly gay bashings in Savannah (as detailed in the book) led to criminal acquittal.
The death of Danny Hansford, the multiple trials, and the characters pertaining to Jim Williams defense are given short shrift. Berendt's tale found a deep fascination in the Jim William's character (good and evil indeed). And his victim, Danny, is described in the book as a "human tornado," and drawn as a deeply disturbed, extremely violent young man, lost in a world of drugs, alcohol and hustling after dropping out of school at age 14. No such complexities are found in the musical's script. Indeed the closest the show comes to actually capturing these flavors of the book is in the "Rotten to the Core" number Jason Robert Brown puts near the show's finale, however too late.
The performers do the best they can with what they are given. J. Harrison Ghee gives a solid turn and delivers the drag camp with aplomb. My caveat being the Chablis, as written here, is just a caricature, and not a human: dispensing "Mama Ru" advice and tolerance doesn't make her a compelling character worthy of trying to carry the show. Boggess brings the most to her comedic villain she can and has the most thrilling voice of the company. Austin Colby brings the smolder needed for Danny Hansford, and hopefully the role will be developed to the point where the deep dark side of the character is more fully realized. Jim Hewitt brilliantly captures the vanity of Jim William's character to life, but vocally he is struggling with the score. (In both acts, I felt like his songs were more in the wheelhouse range of someone like a Howard McGillin). And lastly, props to Daryn Whitney Harrell, who, despite it being only the third show of the run, able stepped in to play Minerva the voodoo priestess.
Christopher Oram's sets along with Neil Austin and Jamie Platt's lighting are exemplary. Toni Leslie Jame's costumes make me wonder if she has ever attended a drag show in her life. To paraphrase Miranda Priestly, "Sequins? Revolutionary!" The Chablis costumes are another of this show's huge misses. Tonya Birl-Torres choreography is mostly generic, but a few of the African dance flares in the voodoo sequences are effective.
No one is going to be leaving the theater humming the score, or even remembering anything about it, even the "anthem" numbers Chablis gets. The script lands a few good one liners which aren't lifted from the novel, but (again) I question who read this source material and said it screamed "MUSICAL COMEDY GOLD?!?!?!?"
Needless to say, I find director Rob Ashford most at fault for losing the thread. The defiantly isolated Savannah and it's genteel, quirky and often dark characters who inhabit Berendt's "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" are nowhere to be found on stage at the Goodman Theatre. If you're craving an absurdist version of "La Cage Aux Folles" however, maybe this is the musical you've been waiting for.
