Review: Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner's Love Life Gets First NYC Staging in 77 Years

When people think of “concept musicals,” their minds automatically go to Cabaret and Company, the two shows that get the most credit for popularizing the style of theme over narrative. But there are a handful of shows from the dawn of the Golden Age that predate them: Lady in the Dark (1941), Allegro (1947), and Love Life (1948).

None of those shows are particularly well-known. Love Life, the sole collaboration between Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner, practically vanished when it closed in May 1949. No recording was ever made due to a strike by the musicians’ union; the score and script were never published in any form. New York City Center Encores! planned to revive it in March 2020; the production made it to a dress rehearsal before Covid shut things down.

Five years later, Victoria Clark’s production is finally getting to see the light of day, with much of the 2020 team intact, most notably to-die-for stars Kate Baldwin and Brian Stokes Mitchell. In an era where contemporary musicals like Urinetown and Ragtime are now being given the Encores! treatment, Love Life is a refreshing return to the original mission of giving sumptuous second glances to rather unsalvageable shows. Love Life isn’t a perfect musical; by today’s standards, it’s quainter than quaint. But this is the show that Encores! was built for, and Clark (two-time Tony winner for Kimberly Akimbo and The Light in the Piazza) does a great job with a tricky piece.

Love Life charts the marriage of an ageless couple from 1791 to the “present” (1948). When we first meet Samuel Cooper (Stokes), he’s a humble carpenter with his own shingle. His wife, Susan (Baldwin), takes care of the kids (Christopher Jordan and Andrea Rosa Guzman, who bring the house down with JoAnn M. Hunter’s tap choreography) while he’s building furniture for the curious locals.

Over time, the boom of industry takes Sam away from his family. First, he goes to work in a factory overseeing first-year carpenters; years later, he sets out on the railroad. Sam and Susan’s wedded bliss starts to sour as she discovers independence via the suffrage movement and begins fighting for the right to vote. By the late 1940s, the conventional ways of life that provided the foundation of their relationship are long forgotten, and their marriage is all but over.

Lerner structures the show like a “vaudeville”—his word for describing the way songs like “Economics,” “Mother’s Getting Nervous,” and “Love Song” comment on the action rather than further the plot. In the second half, there are two dream ballets, and a climactic sequence where a group of circus performers (a minstrel show in the original production, revised by Clark and co-adapter Joe Keenan for obvious reasons) explore the foolishness of love and marriage before Susan and Sam, spurning their advice, try to reach each other via tightrope. It’s easy to see where the creative team of Follies got their idea for the “Loveland” sequence.

As befits an ambitious piece, Clark’s staging is one of the more ambitious Encores! entries, replete with multiple dropdown sets (Ryan Howell), ominous lighting that goes beyond standard concert fare (Paul Miller), illusions (Skylar Fox), 29 musicians (under the ever-excellent baton of Rob Berman), and a cast numbering 31. One of the cheap-looking pre-Broadway transfers that have originated from City Center lately this is not.

And that’s a good thing, because it allows the artists to find their way through an experimental work without the pressure of “industry chatter” expecting a second life. There were the usual opening-night stumbles—a missed verse here, a lost spotlight there—but everyone involved was on the same page and clearly doing it for the right reasons, namely, to give new voice to a lost show.

And what voice! Baldwin brought down the house on multiple occasions, most notably her two eleven-o’clock numbers, “Is It Him or Is It Me?” and “Mr. Right.” You just melt listening to Stokes singing anything here. And John Edwards is a fantastic discovery, beautifully delivering “Love Song” toward the end of the first half, stopping the show cold.

Most importantly, this production cements Love Life‘s reputation as the historical precursor to everything that followed. It might be 77 years later, but progress, after all, takes time.