Juno at City Center: Happy Art, Not-So-Happy Show

I was really struck by the artwork for the upcoming City Center revival of Marc Blitzstein's Juno. It's very bright and cheery. The design makes you think this is going to be a rollicking good time of a musical comedy, full of colorful Irish characters and saucy Gaelic humor.

That may be a bit misleading. Juno is based on Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock, which is a DEE-EEE-pressing play, if ever there was one. Check out the synopsis at Wikipedia. I've never seen the play or the musical (although I do have a ticket to see the Encores presentation this weekend), but from what I can glean, although there are sardonic attempts at humor in Joseph Stein's book, the musical mostly remains true to the dark and sobering tone of O'Casey's play.

It's certainly understandable that the folks at Encores would want a design that actually attracts people to see this production. I mean, one could hardly expect them to create a visual identity for the show that depicted the corpses of fallen IRA members or a funeral procession. The producers of the original Broadway run of Juno cast Shirley Booth in the title role in the hopes of attracting an audience, although no doubt there were many ticket buyers who came expecting to see something more in the vein of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or By the Beautiful Sea. And the artwork for that original Juno had a similarly upbeat feel to it, with caricatures of Booth and co-star Melvyn Douglas dancing a jig around the ol' Victrola.

Apparently, producers don't trust that audiences will want to attend a musical tragedy, and perhaps rightly so: West Side Story is one of the few musical tragedies to achieve critical and commercial success. The first musical tragedy of note was Kurt Weill's Lost in the Stars, a stunning work that ran only 273 performances from 1949 to 1950.

By all accounts, Juno is an admirable but imperfect musical. Steven Suskin, in his book Opening Night on Broadway, describes Juno as "an ambitious attempt which probably would have failed even without the flaws." What Suskin appears to be saying is that, even if the show had been executed flawlessly, it still would have been a hard sell because of the dour subject matter.

Not sure I agree. As I've often said, there's no such thing as a bad idea for a musical, only bad execution. I often quote musical historian Martin Gottfried in class: "No artistic medium is in itself profound or trivial - only the mentality that uses it." It's true that many people have a preconception that musicals are all about sappy songs and happy endings. This is categorically untrue, but the perception persists.
There's room in the canon for all kinds of musicals, with subject matter light and dark, provided the shows are executed with intelligence and inspiration. Sweeney Todd and Adding Machine are two successful attempts at bringing dark content to the musical stage, while the similarly dark Lestat, Carrie, and the recent Next to Normal exist somewhere else on the success spectrum. (To say the least.)

I'll be seeing Juno, with the wonderfully talented Victoria Clark assuming the Shirley Booth role, this Sunday night. Look for my review sometime next week.