Review: Prelude to a Kiss, The Musical Is a Big, Sloppy Mess

Craig Lucas’s play Prelude to a Kiss is a fairy tale about the nature of true love and the insignificance of physical beauty. Now, Lucas, along with co-lyricist Sean Hartley and composer and co-lyricist Daniel Messé, has created a musicalized version that is making its world premiere at South Coast Repertory, where the original premiered in 1988. This time, the kiss is not magical.

Peter (Chris McCarrell) and Rita (Hannah Corneau) meet each other at a party and fall instantly in love. Both are quirky and both come with baggage. Rita is an anarchist who hasn’t slept since she was an adolescent, and Peter has serious trust issues after a disastrous childhood. Still, they’re made for each other, and they marry only weeks later. But at the wedding, an elderly stranger (Jonathan Gillard Daly) disrupts the couple’s nuptials and asks her for a kiss. After that kiss, Peter finds that Rita is not the woman he married.

The original play is loaded with subtext, but it’s done so subtlety that all the components create magic. For the musical, Lucas’s libretto follows the beats of the original, but in the transition some subtext has become blatant and the nuances that made the original enchanting have been obliterated. Characters have been added to no purpose. For example, Rita’s best friend Angie questions Rita’s identity in Act 2 – a virtual repeat of Peter’s journey – and then inexplicably disappears.

The score doesn’t make a case for itself. The melodies are forgettable, and the lyrics are riddled with clichés. Though set in contemporary times, the music sounds like it’s from a different era. Messé borrows cleverly from a few genres for specialty songs, like rockabilly for Rita’s parents’ “Whatever My Little Girl Wants,” but most of the score harks back to the Lite FM of the ’80s.

To make matters worse, McCarrell and Corneau’s lack of chemistry dispels any impact the love story could have on the audience. McCarrell strains his voice to hit the high notes. When Corneau and Gillard Daly go “Freaky Friday,” neither takes on each other’s mannerisms or cadences so you never believe they’ve actually switched bodies.

DeAnne Stewart is quite good as Angie, but it’s a shame she’s not woven into the story more. Julie Garnyé, who plays the old man’s daughter, gives a lovely interpretation of the song “The Man He Used to Be.” Karen Ziemba is pure delight as Rita’s zany mother, but a Broadway star of that quality deserves more than a supporting role.

Director David Ivers doesn’t lift the already creaky material with stagecraft, and the choreography by Julia Rhoads is rambling and chaotic. Costume designers Linda Cho and Herin Kaputkin have an imaginative idea of breakaway costumes for the ensemble between the wedding and honeymoon scenes, but due to technical difficulties, the clothing refused to break away at the performance I attended.

Sadly, the musical fails to surprise us with anything new. At no point is one caught off-guard or charmed, and despite a tale as fanciful as Prelude to a Kiss, this musical fails to cast a spell.