John & Jen

Andrew Lippa and Tom Greenwald's musical two-hander John & Jen celebrates its 20th birthday with a Keen Company revival, now running at Theatre Row's Clurman Theatre. The show takes a refreshing breather from the typical boy-meets-girl love story, a genre that has become no less prevalent in the two decades since John & Jen's 1995 New York debut. Familial love takes center stage instead in this all-American portrait with an apple pie name to match. As the title suggests, Lippa and Greenwald hand their starring pair a couple of blank canvasses to paint on — a challenge that powerhouse duo Kate Baldwin and Conor Ryan nimbly meet — even if their hands are tied by the piece's limited palette of colors.

John & Jen is very straightforward in its storytelling, which director Jonathan Silverstein wholly honors with his simple staging throughout the musical's two symmetrical acts. Imagination takes center stage and, set designer Steven C. Kemp uses this to his advantage, creating a single abstract environment of jutting platforms that carries us from 1952-1990 in Somewhere, USA. Act I opens on six-year-old Jen (Baldwin) cooing over her new baby brother. The musical vignettes that follow offer snapshots of their childhood, with subtle, period-specific costume changes (designed by Sydney Maresca) as our only reference to the passage of time.

A pair of devoted allies in a volatile household, John and Jen jump from an early Christmas Eve (decked out in their holiday PJs), to a snapshot of John's frustration with Jen's teenage-boy angst (which Ryan portrays in the adorably insolent number "Trouble With Men"), to Jen's college years as a liberated hippie about town in Manhattan. This physical distance eventually drives a wedge between the originally inseparable brother and sister, leaving Jen riddled with guilt after John is killed in action in Vietnam.

This would be a spoiler if not for the fact that the audience is already prepared to see Ryan return in Act II as Jen's son John, named after her deceased brother. Now, rather than a couple of comrades ducking for cover inside the same trench, John and Jen become a dysfunctionally codependent mother-son partnership: Jen, a single mother working through unresolved guilt, and John, a burdened son tasked with filling his uncle's shoes.

The character-driven songs in Lippa and Greenwald's score, though not ear worms, are palpably sincere and often emotionally affecting. The two acts this collection of tunes builds, however, join together like a couple of parallel plateaus, broadcasting everything that lies ahead all the way to the distant horizon. It doesn't diminish the heart of the piece, but it does make the journey less compelling. Still, for an anniversary reunion with the material, Baldwin and Ryan pay it a fitting tribute. Baldwin's soprano, as always, has an infectious power that serves her well in a role that, even in childhood, takes on a maternal spirit. She does well enough with her character's playful early years but she hits her stride in Act II as Jen's frayed adult nerves are exposed — enjoying a standout moment in the cathartic eleven-o'clock number "The Road Ends Here." Ryan, the subject of Baldwin's motherly affections, complements his costar as the production's perpetual child. Stuck in adolescence for the majority of the musical, he balances a portrayal of the universal growing pains that plague all John Does of America, while finding nuances within his respective characters to set them apart as unique individuals.

The musical itself walks a similar line between the general and the specific. Clingy mothers, haunting shadows, and family legacies — both good and bad — are as prevalent in American households as Norman Rockwell paintings. There is not much to set Lippa and Greenwald's John and Jen apart from any other representatives of the baby-boomer generation. But their story, like a Rockwell portrait, finds a comfortable spot on our living room wall.