Review - The Blue Flower at the A.R.T.

The venerable American Repertory Theater has come under considerable fire recently because of its supposedly crowd-pleasing, profit-seeking tendencies under the reign of new artistic director Diane Paulus. Well, the A.R.T.'s latest offering -- The Blue Flower -- would seem to defy that populist notion, careening instead into the realm of deliberate alienation and artistic pretense.

A.R.T. purists will no doubt be delighted. This reviewer? Not so much.

The Blue Flower is without question an ambitious and well-intentioned effort. Local Boston-area couple Jim and Ruth Bauer have apparently spent the better part of the last ten years working on the The Blue Flower. I'm told the show was quite captivating at the New York Musical Theater Festival, catching the eye of one Stephen Schwartz (yes, that Stephen Schwartz), who has since signed on as a producer.

Well, either people are seeing something in The Blue Flower that I wasn't able to, or the piece has changed considerably for the worse since its previous incarnation, because the show I saw this past Thursday at the A.R.T. was a tedious morass of obtuse stage business and oblique musical numbers. The Blue Flower seems to want to be both intellectual and sentimental; however, it serves neither of those functions effectively.

The story centers around a fictionalized foursome of artists, lovers, and free-thinkers in Germany in the very early 20th Century: German Expressionist painters Max Beckmann and Franz Marc, Dada artist Hannah Höch, and scientist Marie Curie. Set against the backdrop of World War I, the Weimar Republic, and the rise of the Nazi Party, The Blue Flower sits perched above a vein of great dramatic potential, which the Bauers, despite ten years of trying, haven't even begun to mine effectively.

The main problem with The Blue Flower is its method of storytelling. The authors seem to have made the conscious choice to have the characters rarely - if ever - speak in character, relying instead on subtitles, visual projections, and the supposed narrative power of the songs to carry the day. But often the lyrics appear only obliquely connected to the action, or are opaque to the point of inscrutability. As a result, we have the egregious and off-putting use of narration to set the scene and communicate what the characters are feeling. Ideally, the songs should be doing that, but only rarely do, which saps these inherently fascinating characters of any possible pathos.

It's entirely likely that the Bauers have deliberately chosen this Brechtian presentation style. But here's the rub: Brecht usually had something revolutionary to say. The Bauers don't, other than what appears to be the standard war-bad-art-good mantra. In case you miss the Brechtian parallels, the score here even quotes The Threepenny Opera. But whereas in Brecht the alienation devices serve to enrage, here they merely enervate.

To fill in historical holes, the authors employ the rather inert device of flashing forward 20 or 30 years and having now Professor Bauman (the fictionalized version of Beckmann, played by the remarkably protean Daniel Jenkins) deliver a lecture on World War I or expressionist art. This only serves to further emphasize that the songs aren't doing their narrative job. When the Bauman character actually does speak, it's usually in "Maxperanto," a language that the character invents and speaks as a protest against the supposed meaninglessness of existence. Again, alienating and off-putting.

As I've said, the story here is potentially powerful, but the Bauers don't seem able to evince the inherent drama, which is admittedly rife. For example, when Franz Marc joins up as a cavalryman in World War I, he encounters a gruesome scene involving a severely wounded horse. Anyone familiar with Marc's work will know that horses were a recurring motif. In The Blue Flower, Marc performs a humane act for the dying horse, the sole moment during which I was actually engaged emotionally in this show, and then a narrator steps forward and dispassionately announces Marc's own fate. What could have been a cathartic moment is robbed of any dramatic weight by taking the actual people out of the equation, a situation that happens all too frequently during The Blue Flower.

Jim Bauer's music for The Blue Flower comprises a bewildering and seemingly random mix of styles, from country and western to warmed-over Weill. When the lyrics aren't maddeningly vague, they're banal. After Marc (played by the appealing Lucas Kavner) meets his fate, Marie (a strident and dynamic Teal Wicks) sings, "This day was like no other. I climbed the Eiffel Tower and I closed my eyes and thought of you." She continues, "Things will never be the same." Yes, well, thanks for the bromide: at this point in the show, I was actually in need of a sedative.

As another lyric from the show puts it, "Oil sits on the surface of the water, annoyingly still." Well, in The Blue Flower, it isn't just the oil that's irritating. It's the whole damned painting.

NOTE: New Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regulations require bloggers to disclose when they accept anything of material value related to their blog posts. I received complimentary press tickets to this performance of The Blue Flower.

Comments

[Scot Colford]

Thank you for validating my intuition. While I try never to miss a Marie Curie musical, I had an impulse to skip this one. ;-)

[ccaggiano]

All in a day's work, my friend. I do the suffering so that you don't have to.

[Scott Miller]

I'm curious about your note at the end. Does the FTC really regulate the internet...? I didn't know that...

[Seth Christenfeld]

I think I said this on Twitter, but I'm sorry you didn't like the show--when I saw it in New York (first at NYMF, then at Prospect a couple of years later), I was fully engaged and ultimately almost unbearably moved.

But hey, that's what makes horse races.

[ccaggiano]

Seth: Yes, I saw your Twitter post. Yeah, I'm not sure what to say. The reviews up here in Boston were very consistent with mine, although the Globe and Herald each found at least something worth praising. I was probably the most negative review, but we all found fault with the indirect storytelling. Perhaps it's this production, or perhaps you and I simply disagree as to the inherent quality of the piece.

[ccaggiano]

Scott: Yeah, if you click through the link above, you'll find a copy of the ruling or whatever it's called. Truth be told, I think they're really targeting bloggers who cut sponsorship deals with major corporations but fail to disclose those deals in their product reviews. But since nondisclosure carries a $11,000 fine per incident, I figure it's better not to take the chance.

It's weird, though, because old-line critics don't need to disclose when they get press tickets. Not sure why bloggers need to be singled out, but there you are.

[Amanda]

"Well, in The Blue Flower, it isn't just the oil that's irritating. It's the whole damned painting." Just jumping in to say I really like the way you write.

[John Abernethy]

In 1959 I saw "West Side Story" on the London stage 3 times in one week. Given its musicality it was a hard act to follow. I have since sat through a number of musicals by Sondheim, Webber, and most recently "Wicked" by Stephen Schwartz. Until “The Blue Flower” there was no music in any of them that captured my soul, that evoked feelings of beauty, love, sadness or joy. On emerging from the first of two viewings at the ART with eyes brimming and voice catching I told my spouse that this was the best thing we had ever seen at the ART. Similarly affected she booked another performance, with the same outcome. The music is incredibly haunting and tragic. It reflects the tension in the Weimar Republic between hopes for peace and fears that history will be repeated. The poignancy is all the more palpable since we know the outcome: state-sponsored mass murder in Europe by bullets and gas chambers. The music achieves this I think by its use of accidentals to create a particularly powerful type of dissonance which captured the anguish of the times.The ART chose three lead singers with deliveries that are exceptionally accurate and powerful. Who can forget Daniel Jenkins for his opening lament that “Things Don’t Change (That Much)”? Things don’t get much better than this.

[B.C Guillame]

Saw this last night in it's most recent incarnation at Second Stage in NYC. Your review is spot on. I was so miserable I left at Inetrmission which is something I have NEVER done before and I have seen tons of plays and musicals. Truly Awful! Luckily, the ticket was free.

[Geoff]

I saw "The Blue Flower" at Second Stage in NYC earlier today. From reading your review Chris, it sounds like the show has been revised, but alas, the results are no different than in Boston. I don't know if you plan to review the NY production, but you can just reprint your original notice.

I have rarely been so irritated by a musical, mostly because of the wasted potential. As I sat in the audience waiting for the start, I marveled at the abstract set and thrilled to the sound of a completely acoustic orchestra warming up. No electronic keyboard here: instead a grand piano plunked right on stage left, with an honest-to-God accordion, plus acoustic guitar, cello, and bassoon. I tingled with anticipation expecting something exquisite.

I share our host's frustration with the Brechtian theatrical devices used to tell the story: endless narration, projections, harsh sound effects, stylized movement, and the rest. As I understand it, these devices are employed to remind the audience they are watching a play, to cut them off from any emotional attachment to the characters, to illuminate that theatrical reality is unreal and constructed. This effect in intended to challenge theatergoers to look inward and recognize their own constructed realities and effect change.

This is all well and good, but when the artifice subsumes the story and characters, you know you're in for trouble. This is especially problematic when the story pleads for sentimentality even as the creators push the audience away. I found this dichotomy bewildering and ultimately stultifying. I don't believe Brecht ever intended his techniques to be soporific.

A good score could have bridged this chasm between the characters and the artifice of their presentation, allowing the audience to make some sort of connection. Unfortunately, the songs were uniformly mediocre, bland, and decidedly unevocative of the period under consideration. Every time I started to feel a glimmer of interest in the proceedings on stage, another Country Western ballad would appear and the show would grind to a halt. The audience (at least those who didn't leave at intermission) shifted and coughed in their seats. I cannot recall ever attending a musical in which so many musical numbers received absolutely no applause. I should add here that while Jim Bauer may not know how to write a theater song, he sure can orchestrate one. The excellent orchestrations actually helped the proceedings immeasurably, but by no means salvaged the evening.

I commend Sebastian Arcelus (Franz) and Marc Kudisch (Max) for turning in excellent performances under what must be trying circumstances. They almost made me care about their characters and, trust me, these would be devastating performances if only they weren't constrained by the writing. As it was, Franz's suicide and death in the arms of Max, a turn of events that would normally have left me weeping, left me more interested in the lighting effect than the tragedy of the moment.

Perhaps this was all intentional, you say? A triumph of Brechtian alienation? Hmm...I seriously doubt it. This just strikes me as another example of the alarming trend of writers of modest means attempting to tackle subjects beyond their skills. I would love to have seen what Stephen Sondheim and Hal Prince could have done with this material.

[ccaggiano]

Geoff,

Thanks for the report. I've heard from other sources that the show hasn't changed much since Cambridge. I'm willing to give it another shot (as long as it's a press invite) but I can't say that I'm looking forward to it, other than to see what the new cast can do with the material.