Ross Golan knows how to write a song, as evidenced by his long list of pop music hits (“Dangerous Woman,” “Same Old Love”) and his title as 2016 BMI Pop Songwriter of the Year. His first stage musical, The Wrong Man, originated with a single song (called “The Wrong Man”) in 2005, grew into an assemblage of songs by 2009, was staged as a one-man show starring the author in Los Angeles in 2014, and now arrives as a full-scale intimate musical under the auspices of MCC Theater. With, mind you, the high-powered Hamilton team of Thomas Kail (director) and Alex Lacamoire (music supervision and arrangements) providing the novice composer/lyricist/bookwriter with top-rank musical theater know-how.
All this, plus the estimable Joshua Henry in the title role, leading a cast of nine. Henry gives a high-octane performance, which comes as no surprise to those of us who have watched his engrossing work in The Scottsboro Boys, Violet, and most recently as barker Billy Bigelow in Carousel. He also originated the role of Aaron Burr in the Chicago and Los Angeles companies of that other musical.
Henry is as strong as you’d expect in The Wrong Man, singing and acting his way through numerous numbers and whipping the audience to a not-infrequent frenzy. Even so, this reviewer left the sparklingly new Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space not quite enthused nor convinced. Golan’s musical tells of Duran, a fictional character who is accused of a murder that we see and that he did not commit. The corpse is his girlfriend Mariana (Ciara Renée); the murderer is Mariana’s husband, here called “Man in Black” (Ryan Vasquez, from—you guessed it—Hamilton); and the falsely accused “wrong man” is rather simplistically framed, with the murder weapon placed into his innocent hands.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★ review here.]
That’s it, in 24 songs. We don’t get much dramaturgy, nor information about the characters. Just singing, and plenty of it. Some of the songs are quite good, mind you; and Henry, Renée, and Vasquez, plus the entire ensemble, do well by the material (which is chock full of dancing from choreographer Travis Wall). We get something of a plot, but what is missing is story.
(Given the current-day slog of musicalized motion pictures, we might as well point out that this new musical bares no relation whatsoever to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 film The Wrong Man, a true-life tale of a jazz musician—Henry Fonda, no less—wrongly accused of murder.)
We have seen numerous successful sung-through musicals: Evita, Les Misérables, Falsettos, and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s magnum opus to name a few. All of these, without spoken dialogue, are nevertheless stocked with filled-in characters and plenty of story. The Wrong Man, for all its theatrical assets, doesn’t give us much. Duran is a nice enough underachiever living in Reno. His girl leaves him; he falls for Mariana; she is killed; he is hounded by the law, caught, convicted, and executed, singing to us—again and again—that “the wrong man’s singing this song.”
There is showmanship on display; Kail takes care of that, with contributions from choreographer Wall (from TV’s So You Think You Can Dance) and his energetic corp,s along with Lacamoire’s customarily exciting music making (with a five-piece band led by Taylor Peckham). Rachel Hauck (Hadestown) provides a functional bare-stage set, with effective lighting from Betsy Adams.
I suspect that a significant portion of the audience will enthusiastically champion the new musical, which seems a not-unlikely prospect for transfer. The show is impressive, highly polished, and packed with talent, and Mr. Henry is most-decidedly the right man. But I never quite felt empathy or sympathy for the innocent hero, and for The Wrong Man that’s wrong.
The Wrong Man opened October 9, 2019, at the MCC Theater Space and runs through November 17. Tickets and information: mcctheater.org
