The mission of Encores!, at least when they started turning out concert versions of Broadway musicals back in 1994 though not so much today, was to present worthy old musicals unlikely ever again to be produced. This with an emphasis on presenting the scores performed by a full (and invariably excellent) orchestra using the original orchestrations. Love Life, the 1948 musical that was originally billed as “a vaudeville” with book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Kurt Weill, precisely fits the bill. Except the show doesn’t work, and apparently never did.
The presentation, on view through Sunday, does afford the opportunity to hear Weill’s score—or much of it, as the present purveyors have seen fit to make various alterations—with all the rich colors of the composer’s own orchestrations. Always a treat for dedicated musicologists, yes, who at this point might number in the low dozens.
But while the transplanted Berliner forged a strong body of work over the course of his 14 years in America, Love Life ties for last—in success, distinction, and musical artistry—among his eight Broadway musicals. To clarify: We’d place Lady in the Dark, One Touch of Venus, and Knickerbocker Holiday at the top; Street Scene, Lost in the Stars, and Johnny Johnson in the middle; and Love Life and Firebrand of Florence—not coincidentally, Weill’s two downright Broadway failures—on the lowest rung. The score for Love Life isn’t poor, mind you; it just lacks the distinctive drive of Weill’s other work.
The trouble with Love Life begins with Lerner. (We refer to trouble with the musical, not with the love life of the 30-year-old author, who was then midway through his second of eight marriages.) The idea was to show the disintegration of American home life, starting with a dedicated young couple and progressing to disillusionment and divorce. Lerner’s method was to place his story in seven sketch-scenes as progress, economic woes, time from home, and more intrude on the bliss of the Coopers, Susan (Kate Baldwin) and Samuel (Brian Stokes Mitchell).
Lerner—whose first hit, the 1947 Brigadoon, had just embarked on a highly successful post-Broadway tour—was determined to intermingle his family scenes with outside songs, in the manner of a vaudeville show. As you might glean at City Center, this idea worked well—but only in the first two instances. The opening scene of bliss is followed by a vaudeville-like interlude with a male double quartet doing a softshoe-style number about the complications of progress, called “Progress.” (Encores! tacks on a refrain for the female chorus because—well, I suppose that’s progress, although Weill clearly devised the number and the arrangement for male voices.)
Following the second scene, in which Samuel shutters his home business to work in a factory, the vaudeville interval is a gospel quartet called “Economics.” (This one is clearly “borrowed” in style and content from the “Begat” number in the 1947 hit Finian’s Rainbow.) This works even better than “Progress,” boding well for an evening of scenes interrupted by songs. Alas, this is the last time the vaudeville intervals work; for the most part, the rest of the them are either extraneous or ordinary. And so goes the evening.
Lerner’s other ill-conceived conception is to space his seven scenes of family life over the span of 157 years. That is, Samuel and Susan—and their two young children, Johnny (Christopher Jordan) and Elizabeth (Andrea Rosa Guzman)—start out in 1791 and end in the present, which is 1948; never aging, always the same. Why? Because Lerner was smitten by Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer-winning 1942 play, The Skin of Our Teeth, which was built on the same novel scheme? (Love Life was directed by Elia Kazan, who—yes—had directed The Skin of Our Teeth.)
In any case, we have a scattered story taking place over the centuries, with the simplistic plot—husband and wife grow apart until confronted by a nightmarish crisis—dissected by not always relevant “entertainment” interludes. Let us note that Love Life has been revamped and revised by director Victoria Clark in collaboration with writer Joseph Keenan and choreographer Joann M. Hunter, and understandably so; to start with, the vaudeville show portions have been simplified, removing the professional magic and trapeze acts and revamping them to feature young Johnny and Elizabeth. It is a sad commentary that one of the high spots of this present Love Life is when the trapeze act is replaced by the two kids doing a nifty tap dance to “Mother’s Getting Nervous.” Which Weill wrote as a vocal trio, but never mind.
We can’t fault Clark, one of our most talented musical theater performers, for the changes; Love Life was a distinct failure in 1948, and has nary been heard from since. There was a 1990 restoration starring Debbie Shapiro and Richard Muenz (with a dance specialty performed by the young Nicole Fosse, as it happens). This was presented by the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia, and was hardly worth the visit to Philadelphia. There were also a couple of U.K. opera house productions, in 1996 and earlier this year, as well as a smattering of other attempts. But Love Life is not one of those lost gems; were it not for the participation of composer Weill, the show likely would have disappeared along with other flops of the time. Sleepy Hollow, anyone?
Which is not to say that there aren’t some elements on hand that work. Baldwin and Mitchell, both, are consummate actor/singers. Just about every one of their songs lands exceptionally well. Child actors Jordan and Guzman, who appear to have more than twice as much to do in this version as their counterparts in 1948, are both delightful. Singer John Edwards—who walks on stage from out of nowhere, story-wise—makes a strong case for one of the two stunning songs in the show, “Love Song.” (The other number that deserves high ranking in Weill’s catalog is the exquisite “Here I’ll Stay.”) And there’s the Encores! Orchestra, with longtime music director Rob Berman returning for the occasion. Berman has a keen understanding of the score, and the players know just how to play it.
But Love Life, the musical, simply isn’t very good.
Some historical perspective, for those who care for historical perspective. The show—originally titled A Dish for the Gods—was devised by Lerner and producer Cheryl Crawford as a follow-up to Brigadoon. Composer Fritz Loewe, who seemed to dislike working with Lerner, turned him down and ended their three-show partnership. (Lerner and Loewe would reunite for the disappointing Paint Your Wagon in 1951, after which Loewe again walked away. Lerner eventually cajoled Loewe to rejoin him for the 1956 My Fair Lady and the 1960 Camelot, after which Loewe more or less permanently retired.) Crawford brought in Weill, who had written her 1943 hit One Touch of Venus. Lerner and Weill fashioned the show as a vehicle for Gertrude Lawrence, star of the 1941 Lady in the Dark. Hence the extended minstrel show ending, which has here been renamed “The Love Life Illusion Show.” This is, in effect, a variation on the climactic “Circus Dream” in Lady in the Dark, complete with the demure leading lady turning her big number— “The Saga of Jenny” in the first case, “Mr. Right” in Love Life—into something of a demure bump-and-grind showstopper.
Lawrence demanded 15% of the gross plus an unheard of 50% of the profits; perhaps she was simply presenting terms she knew would be refused. Next choice was Crawford’s good friend Mary Martin, of One Touch of Venus. She turned it down, returning to Broadway while Love Life was struggling through its run in South Pacific. Robert Lewis, of Brigadoon, was set to direct, and might well have helped mold the material into stage-worthy shape. He quit in a huff, though, upon discovering that Lerner had secretly approached director Josh Logan to take over. Crawford’s colleague Kazan stepped in, although he did not have an affinity for musicals.
It has been said repeatedly, including in present-day publicity, that Love Life failed due to the 1948 musician’s strike, which prevented the show from being recorded. Note that said strike didn’t hamper Where’s Charley?, which opened four days after Love Life to considerably worse reviews. But that show, by first-time Broadway composer Frank Loesser, was for the most part highly entertaining; this Lerner-Weill show was decidedly not. When the musician’s strike ended a month after the opening, any record company could have stepped in and recorded Love Life if they thought there was a market for it.
It is also said that Love Life and the prior season’s Allegro set the course for the so-called concept musicals that came along 20 years later. That’s a rather hazy claim, though; I’d wager that the innovative and fantastically successful Lady in the Dark had more to do with it. (For those who care for even more background information, we devoted an early pandemic column to the topic.)
Producer Crawford, while trying to fix the show during its Boston tryout, explained to her investors that Love Life was “a most controversial show which people either think is one of the greatest shows they have ever seen, or don’t like at all.” As Lerner himself noted: “Unfortunately, there is no way to make a downhill story go uphill.”
Love Life opened March 26, 2025, at City Center and runs through March 30. Tickets and information: nycitycenter.org
