Jeffrey Scharf, who wrote book, music and lyrics for the musical Copperfield!, has not been able to surmount the problem that every adaptation of Dickens’s David Copperfield has faced. The book, which Dickens called his favorite child, is heavily autobiographic, and autobiographic works almost always feature as their central characters someone who is reactive rather than someone who initiates action.
I’ve written about this before, some of it in a recent column covering a three-person adaptation of David Copperfield at 59E59th Street, but what the hell …
We think of ourselves as acted upon rather than acting. We tend to say, “Something interesting happened to me today” rather than saying, “I did something really interesting.” Even in the most successful works based on autobiographical material, the character based on the author usually is the most passive character in the play. In Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the character based on O’Neill himself, Edmund, is the least compelling of the four leads. He doesn’t drive any action. He watches and comments. So, too, does the autobiographical character in Neil Simon’s Broadway Bound. In order to justify Eugene’s lack of narrative energy, Simon gave him a case of the flu and shifted focus to Eugene’s mother. As for David Copperfield, based on Dickens himself, he mostly reacts rather than initiating action.
David has some gumption as a child. He runs away from an abusive situation with his stepfather, walks a long distance, and presents himself to his curious and eccentric aunt, who rescues him. After that, as a young adult, David stumbles from incident to incident, mostly observing what other people do. Scharf has tried to overcome this by giving Bobby Conte (who plays the adult David) ballads with a lot of held high notes. But it’s not persuasive. David Copperfield is a writer who makes note of the various colorful characters he encounters. Virtually all of these characters are more interesting than David is. This isn’t Scharf or Conte’s fault. I say again, it’s Dickens’s fault and the problem inherent in writing autobiographic characters..
That aside, Scharf has written a very efficient book for his musical. The major characters are there and the storytelling is clear. The score is more problematic.
Much of the music is tuneful, but the lyrics of too many of the songs suggest that Scharf has something to learn about writing for character.
Here’s the first verse of a song sung by Mr. Murdstone, David’s wretched step-father:
I’ve moved your bedroom down the hall
To a dingy little stall
Where you’ll have to crawl up high to see the view.
It’s a fitting demonstration
Of your fallen situation.
Mr. Murdstone is the master now, not you.
Scharf has Murdstone comment accurately on his own malign motives. But this ignores a central feature of the character: Murdstone is a hypocrite. He wouldn’t cop to his true motives. He would rather claim that everything he visits upon poor David is done to improve David’s character. Giving Murdstone a song in which the villain freely confesses his own villainy is something this villain wouldn’t do. Scharf makes a similar mistake in his solo for Uriah Heep, who also sings of his own dark motives. (Will Reynolds, a resourceful actor, plays both Murdstone and Heep. He does what he can, but the material undermines him.)
The score for the show is played by the actors who carry their instruments with them, an approach that John Doyle popularized. Another show in town uses the same device. I haven’t seen the American edition of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but I saw it twice in London and loved it. I hope that, despite its disappointing reception in the New York Times, it will transfer to Broadway.
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