Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

Stephen Sondheim famously quipped that he had spent much of his career trying to fix the second act of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Allegro. Allegro didn’t work when it premiered in 1947 and it still didn’t quite work when CSC presented a 90-minute revisal in 2014 directed by John Doyle. But something in Allegro’s conception intrigued the young Sondheim. Instead of the usual merry villagers, Hammerstein, the author of the book and lyrics, employed the chorus as a group narrator and commentator, and he seemed more interested in exploring the theme of lost idealism than in delivering much of a story. Sondheim would embrace both of these techniques – Sweeney Todd, too, is narrated by the chorus (“Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd”) and shows like Company and Assassins feature songs that often come across as musical essays circling a central concern. Allegro may not have succeeded, but it opened a path of exploration for countless musical theater writers of the last seven decades or so.

My hunch is that Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth occupies a similar position in many playwrights’ thinking as does Allegro in the thinking of many musical writers.

Skin is often referred to as among the first American absurdist plays (it premiered in 1942). Dinosaurs appear in act one and have lines, various other creatures have lines in a scene set at convention of mammals in Atlantic City, disasters (an ice age and a flood) pop up at the whim of the playwright playing God, and the actors sometimes drop their characters and address the audience supposedly as themselves. Both Edward Albee and Lanford Wilson told me how Skin and other of Wilder’s experimental plays stimulated their imaginations. Skin was welcomed with more enthusiasm than Allegro. It won Wilder his third Pulitzer Prize.

But the past few times I’ve seen Skin, as much as I admired its imagination and ambition, I found the whimsy labored and the moralizing a little tiresome. Before the beginning of Ethan Lipton’s new musical adaptation, The Seat of Our Pants, I struck up a conversation with a director. She told me that she, too, had never succumbed to the charms of Skin. (We were also both aware there had been previous attempts to musicalize it by Bernstein, Comden & Green and Kander & Ebb and neither of these great teams had licked it.) In this frame of mind, we settled in to watch what Lipton would make of it.

When the lights rose for the intermission, my director friend and I looked at each other and simultaneously expressed our delight and surprise – the third time has proven to be the charmed. Lipton’s version indeed works. My hunch is that Hammerstein might have said, “Yeah, that’s kind of thing I was going for.”

You get a sense of what Bernstein, Comden and Green were hoping for in the one song I know from their attempt – “Here Comes the Sun” (no relation to the Beatles tune). It’s a greeting of the beginning of the day sung by the chorus – it’s infectiously syncopated and the melody leaps up and down the staff like a mountain goat. In fact, Bernstein reconfigured the material as part of his concert piece, Chichester Psalms. As joyous and catchy as “Here Comes the Sun” is, it is – if you’ll pardon the term – high-brow stuff.

Lipton’s approach is shaggier, influenced by jazz, folk tunes and music hall conventions. It’s tongue-in-cheek, parodistic. The songs don’t pretend to make grand statements. (As Sondheim once wryly noted, Bernstein loved grand statements.) Lipton’s script also cuts back some on the overt pronouncements Wilder was wont to make. There’s a kind of affable shit-kicking attitude about the material and the staging that is ingratiating, and this takes the edge off the self-importance that commonly has afflicted non-musical productions of Skin.

Director Leigh Silverman has given the proceedings a jaunty production. He is lucky to have Shuler Hensley and Micaela Diamond as Mr. Antrobus (the eternal father) and Sabina (the eternal wise-cracking maid). It is especially satisfying to encounter Ruthie Ann Miles as Mrs. Antrobous. This is the first time I’ve seen her in a leading role, and she makes a meal of it. Daniel Kluger has done a dazzling job arranging and orchestrating Lipton’s songs; they are the best charts I’ve heard for an original musical since last season’s Maybe Happy Ending.

I worry that the quirkiness of the show as produced at the Public Theater might not translate to a Broadway run, but I hope someone takes a chance on it. There is a lot of pleasure to be had here. And there is something satisfying in seeing material that has often proved problematic in the past achieve lift-off in this new version.