in The Human Comedy
(Photo © Kevin Sprague)
You have to wonder what Julianne Boyd — the usually canny artistic director of the Barrington Stage Company — was thinking in resuscitating the 1984 musical The Human Comedy, which librettist William Dumaresq and composer Galt MacDermot adapted from William Saroyan’s 1943 tribute to Mom, coconut cream pie, and the American way. The show, about a small town in California coping amid World War II, didn’t take back then; it lasted all of 10 days once it transferred from The Public Theater to Broadway. And it sure doesn’t sit well now, despite the best efforts of a generally game cast.
If you’re curious as to motivation, the program notes suggest that Boyd’s interest in the piece has something to do with how communities were so much closer during that other war, when, despite the lack of sophisticated communication devices, people pulled together and reinforced one another’s beliefs in the essential goodness of humanity. It’s a lovely sentiment — until it’s crammed down your throat a few too many times. The cumulative effect of this sung-through musical, which incorporates no fewer than 43 genre-hopping but uniformly unmemorable numbers, is like chugging Karo syrup.
Saroyan’s fictional memoir follows 14-year-old Homer Macauley (Bobby List, his eyebrows permanently set in a circumflex of perplexity) as he navigates the social eddies of high school and the challenges of his first job as a telegraph messenger. The musical is, if anything, too faithful to the book, which unfolds like a series of homiletic vignettes involving Homer and his younger brother, Ulysses (the sterling-voiced Eamon Foley, a 12-year-old playing a role that Saroyan envisioned as a four-year-old, which explains some of Ulysses’ dumber questions). The brothers find themselves in various scrapes and states of confusion, awaiting the intervention of a caring adult who’ll explicate, at great length, the ways of the world.
Much of the time, that adult is Debby Boone as the boys’ saintly mother, a widow whose half-sad, all-knowing smile is meant to convey homespun virtue but merely comes across as mealy-mouthed. Moreover, Boone’s voice is better suited to a recording studio than to the vast auditorium of the Koussevitzky Arts Center at Berkshire Community College. Also on hand to steer the boys right is Homer’s boss, Spangler (Doug Kreeger, exuding scoutmasterly virtue and displaying a rich, full voice), and the old codger Mr. Grogan (Donald Grody), whose fate you’d have to be a fool not to anticipate.
Dumaresq is a native speaker of English, but you’d never know it from the tortured syntax he employs here. Homer doesn’t just get a job; as their mother tells Ulysses, “A messenger is he.” Sings eldest brother Marcus (Heath Calvert) about the prospect of dying in combat: “I don’t like the idea as such. I want to come back more than much.” Karl Eigsti’s set, a Jasper Johnsish collage featuring a gigantic 48-star flag, promises grand doings, and Lara Teeter’s choreography starts out snappy. All too soon, though, the musical’s turgid structure — it was originally staged as an oratorio — drags the whole enterprise down.
While The Human Comedy is clearly meant to be an ensemble show — choruses horn in on just about every solo — some of the performers in this production don’t seem to have received the memo. As “Beautiful Voice” (a kind of all-purpose spiritual cheerleader), Cheryl Freeman swans on like the Designated Singer. As Diana Steed, Spangler’s rich suitor, Molly Sorohan appears to be in a play all her own; her characterization almost seems to be based on Patricia Neal’s predatory turn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Diana’s attempts to ensnare little Ulysses in her cleavage are almost as distasteful as Marcus’s number “My Sister Bess,” which is essentially an attempt to pimp, albeit honorably, his sibling to an Army buddy.
As Mary Arena, Marcus’s girl-next-door fiancée, Megan Lewis registers as a feisty, quirky presence throughout. She latches on to the eleven-o’clock number, “I’ll Always Love You,” with real passion. For a brief moment, emotion supplants bromides and you get a glimpse of the immense losses sustained by the Greatest Generation, whose real-life valor is ill served by this tiresome mishmash.
