It should be no surprise to find Herman Melville’s epic, sprawling, exasperating, touched-with-genius Moby-Dick transformed into an epic, sprawling, exasperating, touched-with-genius musical drama. Also unsurprising, it’s the handiwork of author Dave Malloy and director Rachel Chavkin, who previously rushed in where angels feared to tread to escort Tolstoy to the lyric stage in the beautiful Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812. Running a total of 3½ hours in four parts in its world premiere at American Repertory Theater, Moby-Dick, here and there subtitled A Musical Reckoning, will surely benefit from reworking and pruning during this engagement and beyond. But it’s already one of the most audacious, exciting theatrical experiences to come along since Hamilton. And I’m sure I’m far from alone in my eagerness to see it a second time.
Most adaptations, including several films and an Orson Welles stage version, content themselves with the front-and-center 1851 whaling narrative, which you’d think would be expansive enough for anybody. Ahab (stalwart Tom Nelis) ignores the Pequod’s commercial mission, and the importuning of first mate Starbuck (Starr Busby, splendid), in favor of hunting down the elusive Leviathan who chomped down on the captain’s right leg some voyages ago. Malloy’s stab—utilizing considerably more spoken text than the through-sung Great Comet—introduces the characters in broad strokes, going on to lucidly detail the arc of the crew’s odyssey from glee to doubt to dread. Enveloped within designer Mimi Lien’s arrangement of slatted wood suggesting the bowels of ship and whale equally, the cast maintains suspense from Ahab’s nailing up a gold doubloon for whoever first spots the beast, through his mad refusal to come to the aid of the Rachel‘s distraught skipper (Dawn L. Troupe, also affecting as Father Mapple), whose son is among those on a lost longboat. By then we amply recognize that Ahab’s turning his back on humanity seals his vessel’s doom.
A mite Ahab-like himself, Malloy aspires to work the material to even greater ends, knowing that within the dense fabric of Melville’s 135 chapters + epilogue lurks a critique of the American narrative historically, as well as commentary on the current psychic and political state of the union. That last becomes the main order of business even before those famous three words “Call me Ishmael,” when Manik Choksi, who will play that yeoman seaman, enters in khakis, T and contemporary jacket, to chat us up about the book and his own unspecified personal problems to which the novel has proved a tonic. And damned if Choksi doesn’t proffer that paperback throughout, even as he heaves-ho at the rigging and executes all the other stuff that sailors evidently either do or mime in the course of a three-year voyage.
A memorable Dolokhov in the Tolstoy musical, Choksi proves as sensitive an interpreter of Ishmael—whose odd intimacy with savage harpooner Queequeg (Andrew Cristi, excellent) is rendered tenderly explicit in this telling—as he is an affable M.C. and touchstone for an audience which isn’t allowed to forget the tale’s contexts. Indeed, only Parts I and IV deal directly with the hunt for the great white; the two middle segments, each of which could freestand, consist of a rollicking vaudeville to dramatize the whale lore Choksi rightly calls “the most boring parts of the book”; and post-intermission, a mournful cantata detailing the strange episode of African-American cabin boy Pip (Morgan Siobhan Green), who jumps overboard and returns a mad changeling under his captain’s wing.
Theatrically speaking, the big news is Part II’s bill of song and dance dipping into all genres from hornpipe to hip-hop, along with delightful found-object puppetry from Eric F. Avery, extreme props, and audience participation. (No spoilers, but it’s a lot more than Great Comet’s passing pirogies around.) Instruction in how whales are killed, butchered, and used is tempered by consideration of the morality of it all, and there’s even room for a Richard Pryor-like standup routine from a hilarious Eric Berryman as Fedallah, the mysterious harpooner whom Ahab has secretly stashed away. Berryman, we’re wryly informed, gets to stay backstage while his dozen castmates do all of Part I’s heavy lifting. “And I get paid the same salary. Thank you, Equity!” Similar meta touches pepper the entirety of the musical, though never as blatantly or amusingly as in Part II. Suffice it to say that rarely have the boring parts of something so served as the basis of the most delightful parts of something else.
The Pip segment seems intended as an allegory of the nation’s treatment of people of color, starting with the bearded, haunted Nelis looking the spitting image of John Brown. Here I feel the show lets us down with a dearth of change and growth. Once you instantly perceive that Green is a likable innocent, that’s it; the rest celebrates Pip and indulges in Melville’s strange, lugubrious prose-poetry which doesn’t play especially well, even given the evening’s most impressive choral singing. (Or Matias’s musical direction is impeccable throughout.) At least on first hearing, Part III feels indulgent and undercommunicative in the context of what comes before and after it, though one understands why the material is treated so respectfully.
Chavkin remains peerless at melding disparate theatrical elements into a coherent, unselfconscious whole; she and Tony-winning Great Comet partners Lien and Bradley King (lighting) are joined by costume designer Brenda Abbandandolo, all at the top of their game. The sets and clothes—not to mention Chantal DaSilva’s sinuous choreography—partake equally of the 19th century and the 21st, all wrapped by King into a rapturous blanket of color and shadow, including a giant white light wall to convey the passage of Ahab’s nemesis. And though it feels unfair and reductive to opine on a score this ambitious on a single hearing, especially with so much else going on, Malloy impressively weaves Melville’s prose into his lyrics, and the melodies soar with only the smallest hint of repetitiveness.
There’s something bottomless about Moby-Dick, like America itself, that will always elude an artist’s effort to fully encapsulate and trap it like a ship in a bottle. But the courage to try is everything.
Moby-Dick opened December 11, 2019, at the American Repertory Theater (Cambridge, MA) and runs through January 12, 2020. Tickets and information: americanrepertorytheater.org
