One New York Life

Funny story about this show. Ms. L’s birthday is in November. Last November, I gave her a “voucher” saying I would buy tickets for this show on the day of her choosing as her birthday present. I figured this would work out well because we were about to hit the holidays (her birthday’s 11/7) which is quickly followed by tax season. I didn’t want to buy tickets six months out because I hate doing that.

To make a long story short — sometime in October, they announced the show would be closing on January 18th, 2009 and I realized that we’d never gone and her new birthday was about to come up. So, while I saved money on last year’s birthday, I wound up buying double birthday this year. I did my job as a man and picked a day and said “this is the day we’re going” and, of course, I bought the tickets on the night of her company Christmas party. It’s never easy.

A quick plot summary — kids hit puberty in late 19th-century Germany.

The Good

• Some of the songs are really good. The problem is — it’s only some. It’s written by a more modern musician and it shows. There’s no real overarching theme that threads through the show to tie parts together. The musical listens like an album. That’s fine, but it listens like an album with a few really good singles (Mama Who Bore Me, My Junk, Totally F*cked, Those You’ve Known) with a lot of fluff and filler. There was nothing to grab on to and take from the show. When you leave Phantom of the Opera, you remember the overture.
• There were naked boobs! I wasn’t planning on it, but it was a pleasant surprise.
• It was very funny. If I went in to it expecting a comedy, I would have been very happy. They do the awkward teenagers discovering their bodies thing very well. The song My Junk is set around the various students in awkward situations — one has a stacked piano teacher he’s drooling over, one gay student awkwardly propositioning a confused fellow student, and the whole scene is set around a guy at center stage looking at an erotic postcard with a sheet over him while — uh — moving to the rhythm. It works out tremendously (intentionally) funny.
• The stage layout was tremendously unique. There were two or three dozen seats actually ON the stage at stage right and stage left. The supporting chorus singers sat in the crowd as students and occasionally would pop up when the time was right. I thought it was going to be distracting when I initially saw it but it worked.

The Bad

• All the show’s adults are played by one man and one woman. I understand why — the adults are really only small supporting characters — but I found myself occasionally confused about which person they were supposed to be at any given time. That isn’t to say the actors weren’t good, it’s just that there were times where they could have legitimately speaking as more than one person.
• I really didn’t like our Moritz. I don’t know if this is the choreography, but the actor wanted to be a rock-star a little too badly. He held the microphone on the stand with the base of the microphone to the side like Steven Tyler and seemed over-the-top even for Broadway. It just didn’t work for me. In his defense, I didn’t like the entire Moritz storyline which could have tainted him for me. By the way,
• I really didn’t like the entire Moritz storyline. The character kills himself because he fails out of school but the whole failing-out is stupidly arranged and badly told. He spends half the first act desperately freaking out about passing his mid-terms. He passes but the headmaster of the school decides that Moritz shouldn’t be promoted so they arrange for him to fail his final exams. They give no real explanation for this short of “everyone can not be promoted.” Uh, why? Especially since the lead character, Melchior, is explained as the rebellious and morose student hated by the headmaster. They let him go but conspire to expel Moritz whose only flaw seems that he’s jumpy and overly nervous? While he’s in the worst spot of his life, he runs across his old friend Ilse and they talk about old times and she invites him over for some “catching up” and companionship. He says no and then kills himself. But as he’s killing himself he’s talking about how he doesn’t really want to kill himself and should go see Ilse. But… dude… she just left and said she wanted to hang out?
• Then after the suicide, the story out of nowhere cuts to the girls talking about their eventual weddings as they tease each other about the boys in town. Then one girl suddenly goes in to a song about getting molested by her dad. Like — I understand that it happens, I understand that it probably happened more often per capita in the 1800s, but the song was totally out of place. Like, up to this point they’re delivering masturbation jokes and talking about vagina essays and erotic postcards. Then, surprise, we’re talking about a girl getting abused mentally, physically, and sexually by her father. The whole sequence is out of place and doesn’t fit with the rest of the story.
• We got a “this show is two years old and is closing in a month” cast. These guys were getting their Broadway feet wet. I’m not saying they were bad, but they didn’t blow my shoes off like the Les Miserables cast.
• The songs just weren’t solid top to bottom. While there were a couple of very fun standouts, the rest got lost in the shuffle. There’s something to be said that I walked out of theater humming the “There’s only us/There’s only this” tune from Rent. There was just nothing that popped out of this show to make me remember it.

The Rest

The musical is a pared down version of a play. Maybe the play describes some of the events with more detail. I found myself confused by the timeline and found a lot of the story threads rushed together and disjointed. The lead storyline was fine. Melchior and Wendla meet, make out, get pregnant, get separated, and one dies. I can appreciate that. I can even appreciate some of the side storylines, but there was no big tie-in at the end that brought it all together. Combine that with there wasn’t even a really a musical theme to tie the songs together and it felt more like listening to a concept album with live videos than a musical with a story.

They tried to sell this to New York as a Rent for the new generation. It could be like Rent if you took out Jonathan Larson’s ability to take the actual structure of a musical and modernize it with recurring themes and a storyline that all made sense at the end. Duncan Sheik (yes, the Barely Breathing guy) seemed like he took the play and wrote a soundtrack.

In retrospect, I find it baffling this won Tony Awards and took Best Musical in 2006. Looking at the nominees, I realize it wasn’t exactly a heavyweight Avenue Q vs. Wicked fight, but jeez.

I’m glad I got to see it before it closed, but it doesn’t get the Golden TDL Recommendation or anything.

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