Cast of Pajama Game at Manhattan School of Music
We had a grand time at Manhattan School of Music last night, absolutely thrilled by the wealth of talent in their Music Theater Department. We never read the program until after the show, in order to allow the work to speak for itself and to avoid expecting too much or too little from the artists vis a vis their level of education and experience. To our surprise, the superb actors/ singers/dancers were undergraduates, some at the very beginning of their education.
Although there was a wealth of talent onstage, we will focus our comments on the artists that impressed us the most. Likely due to some rather odd casting decisions, a few of the artists, while talented, did not quite make the same impression on us. We will discuss this further on.
As the romantic leads, we found Sid. E. Willoughby and Lucas Rayborn absolutely enchanting and also believable as a couple who are attracted to each other but on opposite sides of a conflict. In the manner of mid 20th century filmed romantic comedies, they fight, break up, and make up. The reason they are at loggerheads is that she (Babe Williams) is the head of the Union Grievance Committee at a factory that makes pajamas. He (Sid Sorokin) is a newly employed superintendent, arriving at a time when the workers are demanding seven and a half cents hourly wage increase.
They were absolutely adorable together in the duet "There Once Was a Man" which seemed to have a country music feel and allowed the two of them to exchange verses in a competition to see who loved the most.
Mr. Rayborn had a clever duet with himself as well. In "Hey There"; he records himself singing the song and then plays it back, vocally commenting on it. In the second act, Ms. Willoughby gets to reprise the song, but without the recording.
Another outstanding performance was that of Oliver Finke as Hines, the Efficiency Expert, who had us in stitches in "Think of the Time I Save". He also served to introduce the show, breaking the "Fourth Wall". There was a knife throwing scene at a company picnic that seemed uncomfortably realistic to us. Sitting on the front row, we were still unable to figure out the stagecraft!
He was joined by Kennedy Percival as Mabel (Sid's secretary) for the delightful duet "I'll Never Be Jealous Again" in which she instructs him in overcoming his jealousy by creating scenes of ever-increasing provocations for him to imagine. The object of his jealousy is Gladys, the big boss' secretary played by Yoyo Zhou, a tiny powerhouse of a performer who brought the house down with her performance of "Steam Heat".
And now we present our opinion of some radical casting choices. Just as we are trying to master our confusion over racial-blind casting ("Wait, why are the parents Caucasian and their son is not?") we are asked to accept gender-blind casting! Seeing a big controlling Boss Man played by a slender delicately boned woman sporting a mustache did not work for us. Nor did seeing the married philanderer Prez played by a buxom woman, also sporting a mustache. Sorry but mustaches do not make the man!
Now we are sure that others in the audience may not agree with us. In spite of good acting and singing, we found the gender bending just confusing and the voice quality all wrong. We know that it was a convention in Baroque Opera and also in the 19th and early 20th c. to have women in travesti playing young men, probably due to vocal timbre and range. But this was different--as if Director Chloe Treat thought she could bring this delightfully dated work into the 21st century. It might have worked if the costumes were contemporary and if the book (by George Abbott and Richard Bissell) had been updated. but this production seemed to have one foot in the 50's (as far removed as the 19th century) and the other in the present day.
We didn't mind burly men dressed as female factory workers; casting principals however is an entirely different thing.
In a bending backward move to signify political correctness, the first page of the program apologized for "any language about the treatment of women and people of color... acknowledging its harmful impact". This seems to pander to the audience which, one would hope, knows that times were different 75 years ago.
Aside from that misguided decision, we liked Ms. Treat's (we don't mean to be snarky but we hope that the director doesn't mind being given the feminine pronoun) direction which kept things moving at a rapid pace. We confess to being puzzled by the sequence at Hernando's Hideaway, a well choreographed (by Sebastiani Romagnola) ballet that needed a more impactful shift of lighting to convey that this was supposed to be the imagining of the jealous Hines. There were beds that looked like operating tables and lots of people jumping under sheets. Should we blame Lighting Designer Emma Deane or Scenic Designer Jimmy Rotondo? How could we when the rest of the production was so well set and well lit?
We enjoyed the apt costuming by Debbi Hobson. Bobbie Zlotnik was responsible for the period wigs, hair, and makeup.
We have saved the best for last and that is the music which compensated for any casting, directorial, or lighting missteps. Long after those issues are forgotten we will still be humming the many musical masterpieces created by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, a team that knew how to set the English language. Maestro David Loud brought this memorably melodic music to vivid life. Reading the program we were happy to note that the young musicians of the orchestra come to MSM from all over the world. A big bravo to each and every one, as well as to all the performers we did not mention.
Our usual quibble is with the amplification. We choose to sit on the front row so we can see who is singing. We wonder whether students in the Music Theater Department are trained in projection, similarly to students in the Opera Department. American musical theater seems to us to occupy a position in contemporary life that opera occupied in Europe in the 19th century. People came for the stories and the melodies. What passes for opera these days is polemic and boring. Just as not all operas became classics and many were trash and easily discarded, so it is with American musicals. There are classics that are worth reviving and others that are trashy and never revived. We see Pajama Game as a worthy classic! We would love to hear it without amplification.
© meche kroop
