An intriguing, and sometimes frustrating, air of inscrutability hovers over Unknown Soldier, the Daniel Goldstein–Michael Friedman chamber musical that’s having its New York premiere at Playwrights Horizons.
The piece is, at its heart, a mystery: a fill-in-the-blanks puzzle with a timeline spanning about 100 nonconsecutive years: beginning in 1973 in Troy, N.Y., where 11-year-old Ellen (Zoe Glick), who’s researching World War I, lives with her extremely cranky grandmother, Lucy (Estelle Parsons, making the most of her very brief scenes); moving to 2003, where the now 40-year-old Ellen (a very fine Margo Seibert), a Manhattan OB-GYN, is cleaning out the now-deceased Lucy’s house, sorting through the vestiges of her grandmother’s life—and perhaps hiding from her own; back to 1919, when an amnesiac unknown soldier (Perry Sherman) is discovered in Grand Central terminal; to 1918, when the giddy young Lucy (Kerstin Anderson) meets and secretly marries a departing military man in a single day; back again to 2003, where Ellen is getting very familiar with a nebbishy Cornell librarian named Andrew (Erik Lochtefeld), who’s helping her get to the bottom of an old magazine photo of her grandmother (the caption: “Has Unknown Soldier found true love?”); to 1920, where Lucy is picnicking with the unknown soldier; and, eventually, to present-day Grand Central. Whew.
That’s a lot to pack into a 90-minute musical, and librettist Goldstein—largely known as a director, perhaps most notably of the (literally) bouncy Broadway Godspell revival in 2011—assembles it relatively neatly. Trip Cullman’s clean staging helps as well. (Cullman also directed Unknown Soldier’s 2015 premiere at Williamstown Theatre Festival.) The content overload is also probably why, instead of drawing us in, Unknown Soldier largely keeps us at arm’s length. As soon as we see a snippet of Lucy and the soldier, we jump-cut to amateur sleuths Ellen and Andrew. Both stories are compelling, but neither one gets the attention it deserves.
Still, Friedman’s music is warm and wistful—Lucy’s whirlwind New York romance is set to the swirling strains of a waltz—and his and Goldstein’s lyrics are witty and wise (Ellen’s assertion that “A milkshake is never just a milkshake/ There are expectations from the start” will surely stay with you for years). The songs—such as Ellen’s revealing and raw “I Give Away Children” and the confessional “Andrew’s Story”—dig deep. “And she smiled/ And I died a little,” sings Andrew of a woman he once loved and unexpectedly lost, sending stabbing pains rippling through the audience. That’s no surprise if you’re a fan of Friedman, who died in 2017 having amassed a varied but still unfairly short list of credits; his Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (2010) rocked hard, but a few of the songs from The Fortress of Solitude (2014)—the achingly gorgeous “Painting,” for instance—are guaranteed tear-jerkers. And now his music is propelling a show about absence and loss. That’s the saddest revelation of Unknown Soldier.
Unknown Soldier opened March 9, 2020, and runs through March 29 at Playwrights Horizons. Tickets and information: playwrightshorizons.org
