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"Being Alive' at PTC (1st review)
Steve Cohen
Shakespeare meets Sondheim meets Billy Porter
STEVE COHEN
Being Alive confounded expectations at the opening of the Suzanne Roberts Theatre, the Philadelphia Theatre Company’s new home.
Belatedly booked as a replacement for a play that wasn’t ready, this revue of Stephen Sondheim songs looked like it would be a simple anthology, one of many lightweight Sondheim paste-togethers. Instead, Billy Porter has created a serious amalgam of Shakespearean text, Sondheim songs and soul ambience, chronicling a man’s journey from birth to death. It is a major theatrical achievement, although not without some flaws.
Being Alive is a celebratory work in its exaltation of mankind, but it is not the toe-tapping party that some expected.
The framework is Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man. Early on, a father tells his young daughter not to fear, "not while I’m around" (from Sweeney Todd). Toward the end, that adult daughter tells her feeble, aged father: "No one’s going to harm you, not while I’m around." The poignancy stabs our hearts.
Porter is audacious in his juxtaposition of Shakespeare with Sondheim. "I Know Things Now," from Into the Woods, morphs into "so long as I have lips to speak." Caesar’s "Death will come when it will come" segues into "Make me alive." And Hamlet’s "To die, to sleep" is followed in the next breath by "Somebody hold me too close."
Smothering Sondheim’s melodies
A stated purpose of this production is to give a black interpretation to Sondheim’s music. In truth, the arrangements are wonderfully complex, going far beyond Motown and funk. But at times they smother Sondheim’s melodies.
Sondheim’s tunes lack the expansiveness of Jerome Kern or the catchy twists of Richard Rodgers. Rather, his ballads tend to progress in small increments, yearning, in search of resolution, almost like Wagner in Tristan und Isolde. The payoff comes when a Sondheim phrase concludes on the tonic (a chord based on the root of the scale), giving the listener a feeling of fulfillment, of completeness. The arrangements in Being Alive frequently take these Sondheim conclusions and diminish them. The chords at the end of many of the songs are too bluesy, ending a semitone below what sounds right. This ruins Sondheim’s intent. Nor does it serve Porter, who wants to exalt mankind’s circle of life and who calls his show "a celebration."
But ultimately the score is intriguing, clothed in stunning tapestry. "No One is Alone" and "I Remember" are gorgeous.
A hip-hop Shakespeare
The third stage of life, called “Coming of Age,” takes fragments of Sondheim lyrics and Shakespearian speeches and sets them to hip-hop music; and the next stage, about courtship, is also sassy— too much so when a girl interrupts a man’s song to say, "You must be smoking crack." That section is titled "Love Jones," referring to the 1997 black romance film, which unnecessarily limits its view. Porter is a great jazz and soul singer and an excellent interpreter of contemporary composers like Adam Guettel, and here his arrangements sound strained trying to be hip. (His collaborators with the vocal and orchestral arrangements are James Sampliner, Michael McElroy and Joseph Jobert.)
The evening’s longest section is devoted to militarism. Seven disparate Sondheim songs are brought together to show the pain of war. It makes a powerful statement, brought to a climax with the question, "When will it end?" from the song "Not a Day Goes By."
Why the all-black cast?
At the risk of sounding politically incorrect, I’m troubled by the fact that the entire cast of eight is black. You needn’t be black to sound soulful. You don’t even need to be black to do hip-hop. The show would demonstrate a more universal outreach if the cast were racially diverse. (Similarly, it’s fine that the klezmer musical at the Prince, A Night in Old Marketplace, had some non-Jews playing Yiddish shtetl dwellers.) That said, all in the cast are excellent, and they demonstrate varied aspects of black experience.
The question remains: Are we to look at this show as a black odyssey or as a more universal one? In the program, Porter says: "It isn’t really about race, but it’s about being human." The show in its present form doesn’t make that clear.
Chuck Cooper is especially fine as the father figure, and Jesse Nager makes a great impression singing "I Remember." Ethan Popp leads the five-man band positioned behind the singers. Al Ciulla contributes some cute choreography.
To read another review by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
STEVE COHEN
Being Alive confounded expectations at the opening of the Suzanne Roberts Theatre, the Philadelphia Theatre Company’s new home.
Belatedly booked as a replacement for a play that wasn’t ready, this revue of Stephen Sondheim songs looked like it would be a simple anthology, one of many lightweight Sondheim paste-togethers. Instead, Billy Porter has created a serious amalgam of Shakespearean text, Sondheim songs and soul ambience, chronicling a man’s journey from birth to death. It is a major theatrical achievement, although not without some flaws.
Being Alive is a celebratory work in its exaltation of mankind, but it is not the toe-tapping party that some expected.
The framework is Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man. Early on, a father tells his young daughter not to fear, "not while I’m around" (from Sweeney Todd). Toward the end, that adult daughter tells her feeble, aged father: "No one’s going to harm you, not while I’m around." The poignancy stabs our hearts.
Porter is audacious in his juxtaposition of Shakespeare with Sondheim. "I Know Things Now," from Into the Woods, morphs into "so long as I have lips to speak." Caesar’s "Death will come when it will come" segues into "Make me alive." And Hamlet’s "To die, to sleep" is followed in the next breath by "Somebody hold me too close."
Smothering Sondheim’s melodies
A stated purpose of this production is to give a black interpretation to Sondheim’s music. In truth, the arrangements are wonderfully complex, going far beyond Motown and funk. But at times they smother Sondheim’s melodies.
Sondheim’s tunes lack the expansiveness of Jerome Kern or the catchy twists of Richard Rodgers. Rather, his ballads tend to progress in small increments, yearning, in search of resolution, almost like Wagner in Tristan und Isolde. The payoff comes when a Sondheim phrase concludes on the tonic (a chord based on the root of the scale), giving the listener a feeling of fulfillment, of completeness. The arrangements in Being Alive frequently take these Sondheim conclusions and diminish them. The chords at the end of many of the songs are too bluesy, ending a semitone below what sounds right. This ruins Sondheim’s intent. Nor does it serve Porter, who wants to exalt mankind’s circle of life and who calls his show "a celebration."
But ultimately the score is intriguing, clothed in stunning tapestry. "No One is Alone" and "I Remember" are gorgeous.
A hip-hop Shakespeare
The third stage of life, called “Coming of Age,” takes fragments of Sondheim lyrics and Shakespearian speeches and sets them to hip-hop music; and the next stage, about courtship, is also sassy— too much so when a girl interrupts a man’s song to say, "You must be smoking crack." That section is titled "Love Jones," referring to the 1997 black romance film, which unnecessarily limits its view. Porter is a great jazz and soul singer and an excellent interpreter of contemporary composers like Adam Guettel, and here his arrangements sound strained trying to be hip. (His collaborators with the vocal and orchestral arrangements are James Sampliner, Michael McElroy and Joseph Jobert.)
The evening’s longest section is devoted to militarism. Seven disparate Sondheim songs are brought together to show the pain of war. It makes a powerful statement, brought to a climax with the question, "When will it end?" from the song "Not a Day Goes By."
Why the all-black cast?
At the risk of sounding politically incorrect, I’m troubled by the fact that the entire cast of eight is black. You needn’t be black to sound soulful. You don’t even need to be black to do hip-hop. The show would demonstrate a more universal outreach if the cast were racially diverse. (Similarly, it’s fine that the klezmer musical at the Prince, A Night in Old Marketplace, had some non-Jews playing Yiddish shtetl dwellers.) That said, all in the cast are excellent, and they demonstrate varied aspects of black experience.
The question remains: Are we to look at this show as a black odyssey or as a more universal one? In the program, Porter says: "It isn’t really about race, but it’s about being human." The show in its present form doesn’t make that clear.
Chuck Cooper is especially fine as the father figure, and Jesse Nager makes a great impression singing "I Remember." Ethan Popp leads the five-man band positioned behind the singers. Al Ciulla contributes some cute choreography.
To read another review by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
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