LoveMusik: Clumsy and Amateurish

Bad theater makes me angry. I think it's about missed opportunities and wasted talent. There's a ton of wasted talent at the Biltmore Theater in the Manhattan Theater Club's new production, LoveMusik. And the entire enterprise reeks of missed opportunity.

What a huge disappointment. All I could think at the end of the show was: This is Hal Prince? Of course, no director, not even the legendary Prince, is infallible. Years ago, I had the misfortune of sitting through Prince's atrocious Roza.

The idea for LoveMusik is inspired: use Kurt Weill's glorious music to illuminate the long and tempestuous love affair between Weill and his sometimes wife, Lotte Lenya. But the execution in LoveMusik is sorely lacking in originality. There's very little poetry in Alfred Uhry's book: the drama is artificial, the situations contrived, the dialog banal.

Hal Prince evinces none of his trademark brilliance in staging this torpid affair. There's no concept in evidence, except for one number in the second act, "The Illusion Wedding Show," which is meant to be a magazine article come to life. The man who helped invent the concept show seems to have forgotten how to put one together.

Throughout the show, Prince falls back on two timeworn theatrical devices: the blackout and the supertitle. This is ironic, given that Prince was one of the people who brought a more cinematic approach to the musical theater, creating scenes that flowed seamlessly from one to the next, eliminating the need for blackouts. And supertitles? (e.g. "Berlin, 1928" or "Bertolt Brecht's California Bungalo") C'mon. That's just plain lazy writing. The scenes themselves should evoke the time and place.

All that said, the leading performances were convincing, at times brilliant. Michael Cerveris and Donna Murphy completely embody their characters, respectively Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya. So much so that, after the first number, I turned to my friend Michael Weingart and said, "That's not Michael Cerveris, is it?" Yes, he said. "Well, is that Donna Murphy?" Yes, again. In my defense, we were sitting in the balcony, but the fact that these two well known performers were at first unrecognizable to me is a tribute to their skill.

What could have been the most interesting musical of the season has turned out to be one of the worst.