Near the end of A Walk on the Moon— the musical adaption of the strong 1999 film boasting the same title — there’s a remarkable song from Paul Scott Goodman, AnnMarie Milazzo, and Pamela Gray. A young girl, having just discovered that her conception was “an accident,” confronts her father. To reassure her, he sings “We Made You,” insisting that when her mother and he conceived her, though not yet married, they very much loved each other.
Searching through song annals from now back to who-knows-when, it’s highly unlikely that anything even close to this one will jump out. And it makes for a highly moving quiet moment in an appealing new musical that includes other quiet moments and some that aren’t quite so quiet.
Pearl Kantrowitz (Jackie Burns) and Marty Kantrowitz (Jonah Platt) spend their summers at the Mountaindale, New York bungalow colony, a compound like those sometimes known in Yiddish — but not here — as a kochelein (for cook-alone). More accurately, Pearl watches over the children through the week while playing mahjong and canasta with the other mothers, all of them Betty Friedan-versed. The fathers come up from the city on Friday night and leave Sunday night, always boasting about how quickly they made the drive.
The problem is that while Pearl’s card-table pals are seemingly contented with their situations, she isn’t. Before marrying in haste — the unexpected pregnancy — she had other plans for her life, perhaps vague plans, but plans, nevertheless. Now she is experiencing displeasure with a marriage that’s become routine, with a husband sometimes preoccupied with his television repair business, with rebellious daughter Alison (Carly Gendell). Pearl is a prime candidate for change, any change.
That’s when bookwriter Gray sends out, as she did in her screenplay. itinerant, sexy-as-hell blouse salesman Walker Jerome (John Arthur Greene), who titillates all the ladies but has a more dramatic impact on Pearl.
Yup, in little time whatsoever, Pearl and Walker have what’s often described as a torrid affair, running off whenever they can to, in the dialogue’s parlance, “shtup.” Pearl takes a hiatus from her cares and charges. She even contemplates running off to the other coast with the persuasive Walker.
Not that their hardly un-idle idyll isn’t noticed, primarily by mother-in-law Lillian (Jill Abramovitz), a woman known to have visions but who needed no vision to spot this all but flagrant event. Hubby Marty does suspect something’s up but has no idea what.
The outcome won’t be revealed here, but bookwriter Gray handles it with admirable honesty. And throughout, the songwriters go to town. In addition to Marty’s virtual lullaby to Alison, there are a few other stand-out numbers — “A World Without Men,” chatted and chanted by the mahjongers, and “Dancing With You,” for many of the ensemble. Most of the solos belong to Pearl, and thereby to Burns, who has one of those shake-the-rafters voices and knows it. So does director Sheryl Kaller, who plants Burn downstage center whenever she can, which is often.
All the songs, if not exactly memorable, are well crafted enough for the Walk on the Moon cast, director Kaller, and choreographer Josh Prince to make something showy of. There is, however, one glaring lapse in a score handily conducted by Greg Kenna and played by his seven-member band. (Wesley Zurick, as Alison’s boyfriend Ross Epstein, also plays mean guitar during some of the amorous action.)
Yes, A Walk on the Moon is Pearl’s story, as well it might be in Gray’s imagination. But as her bungalow-colony tale unfolds, she makes plain that Pearl isn’t alone in her gnawing discontent. Marty also blurts out that he jettisoned a few dreams when Pearl and he married and began raising Alison and little brother Danny (Cody Braverman).
Likewise, Walker has his sights set on something bigger for himself, and, make no mistake, both Platt and Greene have the voices and the presence for expressing their characters’ pressing needs in song. Yet, while Pearl repeatedly lets loose with her fervent longings, Marty and Greene barely sing at all. Platt does “We Made You” to perfection but only sings with others twice more. (Yes, there are company numbers, too.) Greene gets one first-act solo and none in the second act, despite any number of dialog lines that sound like song cues.
In the very relatively new and very comfortable George Street Playhouse, on the ground floor of the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center, the Walk on the Moon production matches its surroundings. There’s the greatly invigorated cast as well as Tal Yarden’s sets and projections, Linda Cho’s costumes (a form-tugging tie-dye top Walker gives Pearl, among them), Robert Wierzel’s lights, and Leon Rothenberg’s sound.
The production’s opening anthem is called “Summer of All Summers,” and the songsmiths aren’t kidding. It’s the summer of 1969, during which — hold your hats — Woodstock burst out (only a few miles from Pearl’s fictional colony,) the infamous Chappaquiddick drowning occurred, the Manson murders terrified Hollywood and the rest of the country, and, off the immediate planet, the moon landing gave Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin their walk on the scrabble.
It’s the historic walk that affects Pearl most. In “Out of This World,” her first (of six) solos, she addresses an astronaut as her way of recognizing she’s wants to take her own adventurous walk. That longing is what inspirits this new and imposing work.
A Walk on the Moon opened May 6, 2022, at the George Street Playhouse (New Brunswick, New Jersey) and runs through May 21. Tickets and information: georgestreetplayhouse.org
