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ON THE RECORD: The Light in the Piazza and Little Women
By Steven Suskin
12 Jun 2005
LITTLE WOMEN [Ghostlight 4405]
Here comes the original cast album of Little Women, hitting the street just as the show packed up its crinolines and headed for oblivion. A moderate life in the world of amateur theatricals seems to be in the cards, which will no doubt be facilitated by the CD. This was one of those shows that underwent a notably rocky development — it was first performed, with a different score and cast, in 2000 — but remained critically underdeveloped.
The replacement songwriters, Broadway first-timers Jason Howland and Mindi Dickstein, tip their hand in the opening moments. The heroine writes steamy potboilers, so why not give the characters a purposely clumsy, mock melodramatic musicale? They come back with more of same later, too. These sequences prove to be neither strong enough, nor wildly hysterical enough, to serve as foundations for their Little Women.
It has been decades since I read the novel (if I ever did read the novel) or saw the Katharine Hepburn film version. My guess is, though, that even today both would bring an old-fashioned-but-effective gulp to the throat and tear to the eye. The creators were presumably hoping for Carousel, but they wound up with something closer to The Scarlet Pimpernel. Which is to say they try to be funny in a contemporary manner that kills any notion of period, stopping every so often to allow their singers to reach the rafters but giving them little with which to reach the heart. We need not dwell on the lapses of the lyricist, but she does herself no favors with lines like "Turn around, go back to Concord / Leave New York behind unconquered." And then there's "I'll shout and start a riot / Be anything but quiet." (New York City had a Draft Riot in 1863 — memorialized, as it happens, in another flop musical at this very same playhouse — but I don't think that's the kind of riot this little woman is singing about.)
Sutton Foster has come along nicely since she stepped out of nowhere to win a goodly number of fans with her Thoroughly Modern Millie. She carries Little Women nobly, but it is hard to be believable when your material is un. Unbelievable, that is. She indeed offers a knockout punch with her first act finale, "Astonishing." But this is a modern-day, riot-rousing Jo March, not the Civil War-era heroine who launched a thousand tears.
AND OFF THE RECORD
Readers of this column might be interested in two articles, written for this year's special Tony Awards edition of Playbill: "Bonus Tracks Bring History to Light on New Cds"Click Here and "Good Conduct Medal"
Click Here, which discusses the career of conductor/orchestrator Elliot Lawrence.
—Steven Suskin, author of "A Must See! Brilliant Broadway Artwork" [Chronicle Books], the "Broadway Yearbook" series, "Show Tunes," and the "Opening Night on Broadway" books. He can be reached by e-mail at Ssuskin@aol.com.
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