Though it debuted (and played for less than a month) on Broadway in 1978, Working: A Musical—written by Stephen Schwartz and Nina Faso and a variety of composers, based on the 1974 book by oral historian Studs Terkel—has lived on, and it has evolved with the times. Characters including a copy boy and a hockey player have been cut. Songs such as Schwartz’s “Neat to be a Newsboy” have been excised. In 2012, Lin-Manuel Miranda contributed two new numbers—one sung by a restaurant delivery boy, another a duet for a nanny and a caretaker—to the score by Craig Carnelia, Micki Grant, Mary Rodgers and Susan Birkenhead, Schwartz, and James Taylor.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★★ review here.]
So don’t be surprised when, during the current City Center Encores! Off-Center production, you hear references to Instagram, texting, “OMG,” and “15 an hour” (New York City’s soon-to-be-mandatory minimum wage). One other big change: City Center–specific monologues in honor of the institution’s 75th-anniversary season: security and fire-safety guard Abdou Sillah (played by Christopher Jackson); 40-year veteran Angie White (Helen Hunt), a ticket taker who recalls that “we were actually told men were supporting families and it was a better paying job so it was hard for us to break into”; her daughter Tia (Andréa Burns), the head usher, who started working part time in high school and “never left.… It’s just, it’s a family to me”; Jon (Mateo Ferro), a box-office worker alongside his dad, Ron (David Garrison), whose favorite part is “meeting people.… Not everyone is friendly, If you come in here yelling, I’ll throw ya right out”; and Abdou’s daughter Fatou Sillah (Tracie Thoms), who checks bags as audiences enter. (Director-librettist Gordon Greenberg, who’s been working on Working for years, is credited with the updates.)
It’s a lovely tribute to City Center and its dedicated staff—and hopefully Abdou, Angie, Tie, Jon, Ron, and Fatou will get their own bow at one of the performances. Whether their stories mesh smoothly into this production of Working is debatable. But that’s always been the issue with this musical, a crazy quilt of monologues and music by composers working with a unified theme but disparate sounds. (“By and large, Stephen Schwartz’s idea of making a musical out of Mr. Terkel’s chronicle of men and women talking about their work, is out of focus,” complained the original New York Times review.) Working has always been, and will always be, less of a by-the-book musical than an evening of (very) loosely connected songs and stories.
As for the songs, Jackson has a great time with Grant’s jazzy “Lovin’ Al” and Javier Muñoz does well with Schwartz’s emotional “Fathers and Sons,” but it’s the women who really clean up. The fantastic Andréa Burns milks Schwartz’s homage to servers, “It’s an Art” for all it’s worth, hamming it up just enough as a woman who’s “not just a waitress/ I’m a one-woman show.” And we are blessed with Tracie Thoms’ dynamite renditions of Taylor’s “Millwork” and Grant’s “Cleanin’ Women”—though at a few points the six-person orchestra threatens to overwhelm her, a pervasive problem throughout the first night’s performance (Ferro was almost entirely obscured on Miranda’s “Delivery”). And hers is a voice we want to hear loud and clear.
Working opened June 26, 2019, at City Center and runs through June 29. Tickets and information: nycitycenter.org
