Sometime during my college days a friend received a middling grade on a term paper with the professor remarking beneath it something like this: “Your essay is so well written that it took me a while to realize you haven’t said anything.” This dredged-up memory came to me while I was watching The Wrong Man, for which Ross Golan wrote the book, music and lyrics after beginning the enterprise in 2005 as his own one-man show.
The Wrong Man is absolutely stunning to look at as crisply directed by Thomas Kail in his Hamilton mode and imaginatively choreographed by Travis (So You Think You Can Dance) Wall in his So You Think You Can Dance mode. The seamless blend of direction and dance that has such alluring affect in the Kail-Andy Blankenbuehler Hamilton is brilliantly reproduced here. Rachel Hauck’s set is economical—the five-piece Taylor Peckham band upstage—with nine chairs and a few benches carried on and off as needed. Betsy Adams’ lighting consists of several parallel neon strips along the walls that regularly shift piercing colors. All of it adds up to theatrical thrall.
Indeed, were the sung-through-danced-through Wrong Man only watched and not listened to, the above bunch would have a stark-raving hit on their creative hands—and that goes especially for the hard-working singer-dancers, at least three of whom are Hamilton alumni from here and there.
[Read Steven Suskin’s ★★★ review here.]
But—here comes the fly-in-the-salving-ointment complaint—The Wrong Man wants to give the impression that it’s dispensing some meaning observations on justice in an unjust, inescapably cruel society, but as it proceeds to the end of its intermissionless 90-minute way, the aspiring tuner adds up to no more than shallow musical-drama, fare that’s somehow reminiscent of 1930s Depression flicks wherein someone might have chanted “Remember My Forgotten Man.”
The wrong man of Golan’s title tells us right off that he’s so wrong he doesn’t know how to regard himself. This is Duran (Joshua Henry or Ryan Vasquez, more on the casting later), a sad sack of a fellow on an uninterrupted downward spiral partially of his own devising and partially due to being the wrong man in the wrong place. Without thinking circumstances through, he has a brief affair leading to an unexpected pregnancy with Mariana (Ciara Renée, a strong-voiced hot presence), whose jealous husband is a happy-go-lucky killer.
As he negotiates that damnable spiral—with its ending obvious very early to all but the most slow-to-catch-on viewers—Duran does nothing but complain about his sad-sack plight. He begins with the first of the Golan songs, then backs himself up with all those that follow. The only dubious success here is that Golan shortly establishes The Wrong Man as the best musical ever tackling the sorrowful emotional topic: self-pity.
Okay, while Wall’s remarkable dances polish the floor to a high gloss, Duran does intone one refrain about wanting to be positive, but at that half-backed effort he’s no good. He just continues complaining to rock melodies that echo, among other contemporary influences, rhythm-and-blue and rap. (A bow to Hamilton?) He resorts to rhymes (off-rhyme really), like “facts” matched with “mask.” This isn’t to say that the score has no impact. It is to say that eventually the numbers begin to sound very much like.
Yes, dancing’s the thing at The Wrong Man, and it’s further distinguished about two-thirds of the way though when Wall revives a marvelous old dance tradition developed at the early part of the 20th century and popular again (at least on television variety shows) during the 1950s—The French Apache. During the demanding exercise two volatile lovers throw each other around a stage to the tune of ditties like “”Under Paris Skies.” Wall cleverly thinks the French Apache is relevant in this situation to Duran’s romance troubles, and thank providence that he does.
The Wrong Man ensemble—dressed by Jennifer Moeller and Kristin Isola in various shades of street-cred grey—also includes Anoop Desai, Malik Kitchen, Libby Lloyd, Amber Pickens, Kyle Robinson, Debbie Christine Tjong, Julius Williams, and the particularly outstanding Tilly Evans-Krueger, who sure has some intense Apache moves in her.
As to the Joshua Henry-Ryan Vasquez casting, the latter is the production’s alternate Duran, with his performance schedule explicitly spelled out in the Playbill. (He otherwise appears as the plot’s pistol-gleeful “Man in Black.”) At the preview attended, Vasquez played Duran—and I therefore cannot report on Henry’s performance. (Let me add that I have yet to see Henry give anything but a dynamic performance, no matter what he’s doing). Duran is perfectly fine as Golan’s incessant whiner. He sings and dances with the required furrowed-brow passion.
It may be meaningful to point out that Vasquez is white and Henry is black, leading to the possibility that when Henry is in the role, a racist element enters the pulsing atmosphere. It could be that the circumstantial evidence brought against Duran in the final crisis he faces could play to a jury’s biases. Maybe yes, maybe no.
In closing, let’s note that the woeful items Golan has penned for Duran (which Golan himself performed when presenting The Wrong Man as a monologue) boasts the most powerful anthem ever thought up for a self-pity poster boy. It’s called—you guessed it—“Why Me?”
The Wrong Man opened October 9, 2019, at the MCC Theater Space and runs through November 17. Tickets and information: mcctheater.org
