Echoes of 'Les Miz'
A Tale of Two Cities, a new musical at the Asolo, has much to like, but it calls on its predecessor more than it should.
By John Fleming, Times Performing Arts Critic
Published October 30, 2007
A Tale of Two Cities
The musical by Jill Santoriello runs through Nov. 18 at the Asolo Repertory Theatre, 5555 N Tamiami Trail, Sarasota. $18-$56. (941) 351-8000; www.asolo.org.
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SARASOTA - It was the best of shows. It was the worst of shows.
For the Asolo Repertory Theatre and its audience, A Tale of Two Cities is a great experience, a new musical with a terrific cast, splendidly high production values and the pleasure of seeing a beloved classic come to life onstage.
But for producers of the musical by Jill Santoriello, who wrote the music, lyrics and book, it could turn out to be a disappointing and expensive at a reported $12-million investment experience. Tale is being touted as a pre-Broadway tryout, but it's hard to imagine the show having success on Broadway, or even getting there. Broadway already has two perfectly serviceable musicals adapted from sprawling romantic novels that have been packing them in for decades.
Producers never seem to learn when it comes to trying to replicate the phenomenal track record of Les Miserables and The Phantom of the Opera. For many years, pop songwriter Frank Wildhorn reached for the gold ring with Gothic potboilers such as Jekyll & Hyde, The Scarlet Pimpernel and Svengali (which also had a tryout at the Asolo in 1991), and several had respectable Broadway runs, but they always felt like knockoffs. Seven years ago, a musical drawn from another 19th century classic, Jane Eyre, had a short stay on Broadway.
Santoriello, who is making her musical theater debut with Tale, seems to be coming from an authentic (that is, not strictly commercial) place in her treatment of Charles Dickens' novel. But let's face it, any show about the French revolution is going to suffer in comparison to Les Miserables, especially one that so obviously owes a debt to it.
Tale's vocal writing features the same kind of yearning, high-pitched arias that spawned a generation of whiny baritones belting out Stars. Sydney Carton, the dissolute lawyer who is Dickens' hero, even has a stirring number, I Can't Recall, performed under a glittering canopy of, yes, stars.
There are other unfortunate echoes of its illustrious pop-operatic predecessors in Tale's sumptuous staging by director Michael Donald Edwards, such as the play within a play at the top of the second act, complete with glinting guillotine prop, whose grotesquely masked street performers recall the partygoers of Masquerade that open Act 2 of Phantom.
A familiar story
Santoriello has done a skillful job streamlining the Dickens opus, with Friday's opening-night performance clocking in at about 2 1/2 hours, including intermission. But again, the comparison with Les Miserables is telling. The Victor Hugo novel was familiar in name but mostly unread by American theatergoers, which allowed for a certain freedom in the musical's book. A Tale of Two Cities, on the other hand, is known to all from high school English class, and the novel's catchphrases are laboriously worked into the musical, as in Sydney's ode to the joy of drink: "For two free Englishman with two full glasses - it's the best of times." In the finale, the doomed barrister's famous last words ("It is a far, far better thing . . .") land with a thud.
James Barbour, a veteran of pop opera on Broadway (he was Rochester in Jane Eyre), plays Sydney as a tousle-haired, sulky adolescent, which makes his booming voice seem all the more incongruous in the moody Reflection, in which he gazes into a mirror and beats himself up for being a drunk and unworthy of the ingenue Lucie Manette. Barbour is a powerfully charismatic presence, and his performance tends to overwhelm the humdrum characterizations of Jessica Rush's Lucie and Derek Keeling's Charles Darnay, the French nobleman who marries Lucie.
The large cast is loaded with excellent character actors, including Craig Bennett, playing a grave robber, whose delightful softshoe with two cronies in a cemetery is a highlight; Nick Wyman, as John Barsad, a scalawag right out of a Victorian penny dreadful; and Alex Santoriello (the composer's brother), a sturdy singer as Dr. Alexander Manette, who is "recalled to life" after being locked away in the Bastille for 17 years.
Natalie Toro works hard as the avenging angel of the French people, Madame Defarge, but her big blood-curdling scene during the Reign of Terror goes tiresomely over the top.
The centerpiece of Tony Walton's superb scenic design is a two-level framework that cast and crew members push around to convert from Parisian street to gilded court to London parlor with perfect fluency. The vivid lighting (Richard Pilbrow) and lush costumes (David Zinn) are treats for the eye. Music director Jerry Steichen conducted the 11-piece orchestra.
If Tale has dim prospects on Broadway, that doesn't mean it's not well worth taking in at the Asolo, an intimate, ornate setting that is ideal for the show.
John Fleming can be reached at (727) 893-8716 or fleming@sptimes.com.