In the fevered race to turn every movie ever made into a musical, bookwriter Jonathan Marc Sherman, composer Duncan Sheik and lyricists Sheik and Amanda Green have now pillaged and metaphorically burned Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.
That’s the one that the prolific, always entertaining Paul Mazursky directed and co-wrote with Larry Tucker. It’s the box-office click—starring Natalie Wood, Dyan Cannon, Elliott Gould and Robert Culp—that hit the 1969 zeitgeist nail on the head in regard to “key parties” (sometimes called “wife-swapping parties”) that at the time were buzzed about as all the rage among certain urban couples.
Of course, this is 2020 when dodgy manners and prickly mores have shifted. If key parties still offer chancy alternatives to those with marital challenges, the idea of them is no longer as titillating as it was a half-century ago.
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★ review here.]
Never mind. These Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice appropriators announce that “It’s 1969” immediately after chatty-throughout Band Leader (Suzanne Vega) introduces this Bob (Joél Pérez), Carol (Jennifer Damiano), Ted (Michael Zegen), and Alice (Ana Nogueira).
They arrive wearing the late 1960s outfits (eventually items like gaudy striped trousers, white André Courrèges boots) that costumer Jeff Mahshie has unearthed, perhaps from local Goodwill stores. The four begin circulating among the 1960s furnishings that set designer Derek McLane has supplied for the actors to push around, most significantly to convert into various beds, the last of which is the one where the inevitable wife-swapping hilarity is supposed to occur.
Unfortunately, Sherman, Sheik and Green haven’t taken into account that merely announcing the flashback date will automatically eradicate current audiences’ contemporary cultural references. Watching Bob, a documentary filmmaker, and Carol (no career specified) indulge in a self-help weekend, presided over by Band Leader, doesn’t possess anything like the zing those ubiquitous send-ups had at the earlier time—when everyone was signing up for Werner Erhard’s EST (for Erhard Seminars Training) or, if not signing up for it, were being endlessly told about the encompassing experience by those who had signed up and followed through.
Sherman, Sheik, Green and director Scott Elliott seem to have overlooked the likely possibility that those who lived through the 1960s (and the slogan “if you remember the ‘60s, you weren’t there”) will no longer find mocking the era even minimally interesting and, furthermore, that those who didn’t live through it might wonder what-the-hell is going on, anyway.
It’s more tiresome than amusing to watch this Bob, Carol, Ted, and Alice analyze their unions for 105 intermissionless minutes during which both men and Carol—but not apparently the too dim Alice—have one-night stands they decide to confess and then revel in, as if honesty is ultimately the glue holding husbands and wives together and that at the end of the day infidelity is always a negligible matter.
Indeed, the less said about this Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, the better—with its Kelly Devine musical staging, such as it is. Yes, by the broadest definition the flimsy property is a musical. Every once in a while Sheik and Green, both of whom have done noteworthy work in the past, insert a songlet, featuring something resembling a melody and something resembling a lyric.
Quoting the Sheik-Green lyrics at length would only be embarrassing to them, but at one point Band Leader Vega gets to observe that “no one wants to admit it/ that maybe there is a limit/to desire.” Notice that “admit it” is meant to rhyme with “limit.” Even more baffling, what does the awkwardly expressed sentiment actually mean? Are there really people who think about a limit to desire, much less adamantly refuse to admit it?
Bringing all this flummery to the audience—and, potential audience members be warned, sometimes buttonholing patrons to join them in the action—Pérez, Damiano, Zegen and Nogueira are up a musical creek without a single paddle among them. Try as they might (and they do try with all their might), they can make nothing of it. Neither does Vega. The most they all achieve is preserving dignity for future assignments. Congrats to them for that.
When the benighted Bob, Carol, Ted, and Alice finally get into bed for their final snuggle—and remember that Mazursky and Tucker copped out here before Sherman, Sheik and Green snatched the opportunity—they’re at a Las Vegas hotel where Tony Bennett is headlining. (Likely it’s the Sahara, Bennett’s stop in those days.) They’re all hot to see him—hotter, as it turns out, than they are for each other. Who wouldn’t be? Bennett can still sing the superb Carolyn Leigh-Cy Coleman “The Best is Yet to Come” and deliver on the song’s promise. This bunch manifestly can’t.
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice opened February 4, 2020, at Signature Center and runs through March 22. Tickets and information: thenewgroup.org
