The Beast in the Jungle, a new musical about a man who wants desperately to be in love but spends his life running away from it, is both entirely lovely and occasionally makes you want to run away.
This new project from John Kander, directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, and with a book by David Thompson, puts one in mind of the old Mario Cuomo aphorism about poetry of a campaign and the prose of governance. The poetics of this show are gorgeous; the prose is clunky and plodding.
The audience enters the Vineyard Theatre, which has staged much of Kander’s recent work and where The Beast in the Jungle opened tonight, to see a backdrop that appears to be a sort of stylized, painterly fire at center stage. When the show begins, Kander’s overture starts, and it’s bright and pretty, very pastoral. The stolid character actor Peter Friedman eventually enters, in a suit and scarf, holding flowers, looking sad. He’s trailed by black-clad dancers, mimicking his walk. It’s elegant and pretty, until the dancers lift cut pieces of paper to form the shape of a menacing face.
These are dancers-slash-puppeteers, and one pauses to admire, even in these first moments, the grace of of Stroman’s work. The observant program-reader also will have already noticed three numbers listed called “Matisse I,” “Matisse II,” and “Matisse III,” so it gives away little of the plot that will come to note that this constructed being bears more than a little resemblance to a Matisse cut-out.
After that we cut to Friedman at home in his apartment—the character is called John Marcher, we’ll learn—where he’s visited by his nephew (nameless), played by Tony Yazbeck. You see, Mercer is an art dealer, and a study for Matisse’s “Dance” is at the center of his long, great, unfulfilled (if not unconsummated) love affair, which began when he was young and traveling Europe and first saw that Matisse. Now he is old and sad and lonely, and he believes he is haunted by a beast—a metaphorical (unless it isn’t) being that keeps him from getting too close to anyone. Through a series of flashbacks, we’ll follow his sad story, with Yazbeck playing, and dancing, the young Marcher.
The dances are routinely wonderful. Yazbeck is one of Broadway’s leading dancer-actors, and he’s paired here with Irina Dvorovenko, the former American Ballet Theater principal dancer, as the great love of his life, a beautiful and romantic Italian named May. Young Marcher was a cad, and there are a half-dozen other young women dancers. Stroman’s choreography is balletic and elegant, and she often moves her dancers into groupings evoking that great Matisse work. Kander’s music, often mournful while relating this unhappy love story, is equally tender.
But Kander and Stroman’s poetry is consistently interrupted by Thompson’s tedious, repetitive prose. The play is “inspired” by a Henry James novella, though the author would no doubt find this uninspirational. That first scene, in the apartment, is a clunker. (Marcher: “Didn’t we agree you’d call or text or whatever before you let yourself in?” Nephew: “I tried to call. You didn’t pick up.” Marcher: “It’s not a good night for me.” Nephew: “Don’t throw me out. I can’t be thrown out onto the street again.”)
The rest of the story is structured as three flashbacks that move forward (march?) through Marcher and May’s relationship, vignettes in 1968, 1988, and today, in Naples, in the Cotswolds, in New York. For each, there is an opening setup scene between Marcher and his nephew, and then the danced flashback, interspersed with narration. Each time we get Kander and Stroman’s beauty, and then we’re told the same thing over again by Thompson’s script. It’s almost like the old Garrett Morris Saturday Night Live bit: simultaneous translation for those hard of feeling.
The problem multiplies: “The Beast” is an intriguing metaphorical idea—but the script keeps trying to turn it into something more inexplicably corporeal. There is a beautiful final moment of a broken Marcher at May’s graveside—and we get several more scenes explicating his same brokenness.
The scenic and costume design, by Michael Curry, is fine, and the lighting, by Ben Stanton, is especially textured and gorgeous. Stroman provides her excellent cast with charming directorial flourishes. You can’t help wanting to fall in love.
But you won’t.
The Beast in the Jungle opened May 23, 2018, at the Vineyard Theatre and runs through June 24. Tickets and information: vineyardtheatre.org
