Most of you will miss seeing Gone Missing, which receives only two showings in the Encores! Off-Center series of Off Broadway musicals that are staged in concert performances at New York City Center. The first concert was given last night and the second is tonight, and that’s it.
And that’s too bad, because Gone Missing is a quirky, mostly droll, occasionally touching, 75-minute docu-musical that regards dozens of individuals talking about things they’ve lost: Keys, heirlooms, pets, phones, teeth, their virginity, their mind, and an array of other items, valuable or otherwise, not excepting the entire continent of Atlantis. Echoing the musical’s theme, a specific storyline is omitted here in favor of presenting an assortment of bits and pieces.
Created by The Civilians, a cool collective that more or less makes theater from real-life doings, Gone Missing was drawn from interviews with people expressing their feelings about wayward possessions. Steve Cosson, the group’s artistic director, neatly crafted some of this material as sundry conversations, anecdotes and monologues while composer/lyricist Michael Friedman developed other portions into lively songs of contrasting pop modes.
The musical was staged Off Broadway in the summer of 2007. Back then, I characterized the show as an “enjoyable collage” and “thoughtful entertainment.” So it remains today in the fleet concert staging by Ken Rus Schmoll that also features witty synchronized moves in Karla Puno Garcia’s choreography.
Scripts usually in hand in the customary Encores! manner, six actors easily assume different accents and attitudes to represent several dozen people.
Among their highlights: The ever-ebullient Taylor Mac, spiffy in a tan suit, dramatically croons through “Lost Horizon” with its lyrics about living in imaginary places such as Shangri-La and Xanadu “without you.” An angular, ever-dry Susan Blackwell gives a matter-of-fact voice to a pet psychic’s experiences with horses and fish. A lanky charmer, John Behlmann depicts a nonchalant cop who every now and again recalls the missing parts of various corpses he’s encountered on his beat. David Ryan Smith wisely underplays the drama of a security guard at the World Trade Center who dropped his palm pilot during 9/11. Aysan Celik paints a hilarious portrait of an obsessive woman desperately hunting down a lost Gucci pump and driving her friends crazy in doing so. Deborah S. Craig sweetly portrays a Midwestern mom who tells how her husband dove into a dumpster to rescue their daughter’s beloved sock puppet.
Expertly backed by a small onstage band under Chris Fenwick’s direction, clad in well-chosen street clothes and performing amid minimal scenery, these top-notch actors manage to conjure up a sense of intimacy within City Center’s cavernous auditorium.
The whimsical Gone Missing offers a few poignant moments, particularly so during the song “Stars,” with this touching refrain: “And all we see is stars / falling from so far away. The things that we see / are just memories of the things that used to be.” The song seems especially poignant because Michael Friedman, who wrote it and was also the 2017 artistic director of Encores! Off-Center, unexpectedly died last year of complications from AIDS at the age of 41. No doubt his untimely loss was sadly missed by many people among last night’s audience.
