In recent years, Encores! has presented productions of musicals with good name recognition, including “Into the Woods,” “Titanic” and “Urinetown.” With its latest offering, “Love Life,” the series returns to its original mission statement by presenting an obscure show, one devoid of standards at that — nothing in it would start a singalong at even the most hard-core piano bar.
Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s musical opened on Broadway in 1948, ran for 252 performances and over the years has developed a cult following largely thanks to its daring storytelling. It touched on what constitutes the fabric of American life and integrated vaudevillian interludes, thus paving the way for the likes of “Cabaret” and “Chicago.”
Yet the show has been absent from New York stages in the intervening decades. There wasn’t even an original cast recording to help popularize the score. There is grainy footage of one of its original stars, Nanette Fabray, performing “Green-Up Time” on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” and some numbers have popped up on various albums, like Bryn Terfel’s cover of “Here I’ll Stay.” But for the most part, “Love Life” is fairly unknown these days.
Naturally, this made it a desirable target for Encores!, which is presenting a semi-staged production through Sunday at New York City Center.
As directed by Victoria Clark, this “Love Life” gives us only glimpses of the musical’s potential. The vocals are top-shelf, with particularly thrilling ensemble singing and harmonies, especially on “Susan’s Dream,” which almost gets within reach of the Encores! high-water mark of “Sing for Your Supper” in its 1997 production of “The Boys From Syracuse.” (Rob Berman conducts the onstage orchestra.)
But for the most part the show never really catches. This musical is just too wonderfully weird to be on cruise control — it requires an inventive and even biting staging, and certainly not one that tempers Weill and Lerner’s satirical perspective with sentimentality.
We meet the two main characters, Sam (Brian Stokes Mitchell) and Susan Cooper (Kate Baldwin), in the present — whether that is 1948 or now is a little unclear — when their marriage is on the rocks. They are dragged onstage from the audience by young magicians who turn out to be their children, Elizabeth (Andrea Rosa Guzman) and Johnny (Christopher Jordan), trying to bring their parents back together. Enlisting the kids in saving the family unit is a departure from the original and makes clear from the get-go that Clark, who did the concert adaptation with Joe Keenan (a novelist and “Frasier” writer), is putting the Coopers front and center.
Which they are, of course, but not in a conventional way. After that setup, the show travels to 1791 then moves forward in time in a series of scenes set in various eras. In 1894, for example, Susan is involved in a feminist group and leads the barnstorming “Women’s Club Blues,” whose music builds from rumbling vamps to explosive boogie-woogie. Unfortunately JoAnn M. Hunter’s perfunctory choreography does not lift the number into showstopping territory.
The years and even decades may be passing, but the four Coopers never age, like the nicest singing, dancing vampires ever. Sam holds different jobs and Susan starts working outside the home. They become progressively embittered with life, with each other, with the gendered roles they are stuck in.
That alone would set “Love Life” apart from its contemporaries, but Lerner and Weill upped the ante by interpolating the Coopers’ story with numbers that comment on the action by borrowing from vaudeville tropes. They are performed in front of a curtain, as often happened in that genre, and one centers on the traditional vaudevillian figure of a hobo (John Edwards, in stunning vocal form in the torchy solo “Love Song”).
Act II dumps the guardrails and turns fascinatingly odd — which is saying something for a show that is, after all, about a seemingly immortal family standing as a metaphor for an increasingly fractured America where moving forward does not necessarily translate as an improvement for everybody.
It all peaks with a fantasy suite of distinct vignettes led by an M.C. (Edwards again) in an effort to reunite the estranged Sam and Susan. The original version was done as a minstrel performance, but at Encores! it is retooled as a magic fantasy, “The Love Life Illusion Show.” Among the indications that the timeline here extends beyond 1948 is that the “Madame Zuzu” segment’s Miss Horoscope (Nicole Fernandez-Coffaro) and Miss Mysticism (Ta’Nika Gibson) are, according to the revised script, “dressed as New Age influencers” — which the costume designer Tracy Christensen seems to have interpreted as 1960s hippies. By that point I had stopped trying to make sense of it all, and just let the voices carry me.
If anything, this production will hopefully encourage others to take a stab at “Love Life.” A better staging may be on the horizon — and perhaps that, too, is a metaphor for America.
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