By Samuel L. Leiter
Laughter and sentiment blend perfectly in this musical rumination on time and life.
It’s about time. I mean, it’s about time I was able to leave an Off-Broadway show with a smile on my face, a tap to my toe, and even a lump in my throat. The reason is About Time, the new revue of songs by the venerable duo of Richard Maltby, Jr., lyricist, and David Shire, composer. The show, which opened March 8, is at the infrequently used Marjorie S. Deane Little Theatre, located in the Gilded Age neighborhood of W. 64th Street near CPW.
For two and a quarter hours (with an intermission) the audience is treated to over two dozen songs, each a self-contained story or episode, ostensibly related to “time.” The cast is a perfectly chosen ensemble of five polished, middle-aged singer-actors, three men and three women: Allyson Kaye Daniel, Sally Wilfert, Lynne Wintersteller, Darius de Haas, Eddie Korbich, and Daniel Jenkins.
The premise, outlined in an opening song, is to link the numbers as reflective of time passed, lives lived, experiences recalled. The question of what it all means is asked but essentially left unanswered. So don’t go expecting philosophical ruminations on the meaning of life; just sit back and appreciate songs filled with nostalgia, sentiment, humor, wisdom, longing, and regret, a good many of them fitting the theme only if you must have a thoughtful tussle or two.
The songs, arranged for solo, duet, and group performance, deal mostly—and good-naturedly—with subjects a middle-aged or elderly audience will appreciate. I actually found myself nodding in agreement with many of the familiar sentiments.
Maltby and Shire, who began their partnership at Yale (class of ’59), have written countless songs for movies, on and Off-Broadway shows, television, and so on. Two of their shows were hit revues called Starting, Starting Now and Closer than Ever, to which they consider About Time the third act in a trilogy Maltby refers to as Life: A Musical.
In a brief post-performance chat with Maltby, he told me that perhaps 80 percent of the material is new. When I mentioned that a paean to New York called “Manhattan Skyline” sounded familiar, he replied that he wrote the lyrics for it after musical director Deniz Cordell, one of the show’s two brilliant pianists (Scott Chaurette adds bass), adapted it from a section of Shire’s background score for the movie Saturday Night Fever (in case you remember only the Bee Gees).
Mitchell Fenton’s lighting morphs atmospherically from song to song, suitably shifting colors on the upstage cyclorama. And the players often switch their dressily casual or casually dressy costumes (designed by Tracy Christenson) as the songs shift tone, rhythm, and subject on a dime. Aside from the twin Steinways played by Cordell and Annie Pasqua, the set (scenic consultant James Morgan) is bare except for several trunks, a closet-like arrangement of hanging costume pieces, and a free-standing door.
Some numbers, like “Kensington Kenny,” about a gay, cross-dressing, Cockney vaudevillian, prancing in top hat and tails, may not easily fit the theme, but it offers Eddie Korbich a show stopper, just as do other routines for his colleagues, all of them smartly directed by Maltby himself, with sleek choreography and musical staging by Marcia Milgrom Dodge.
Maltby’s sprightly, brightly rhyming lyrics include incipient memory loss (“Keys”), reminiscence of a first love (“Little Susan Lawrence”), aging guys anxious to regain their machismo (“Vroom! Vroom! Vroom!”), the fate of female bodies (“Over-Ripe Fruit”), leaving one’s beloved home (“Just a House”), travel memories (“I’m There”), sending the kids off to college (“Free”), and so forth.
But there are pertinent stand-alone songs for which the time theme is a stretch, like “Smart People,” about the roundabout ways TV writers allude to Jewish characters, “I Like Jazz,” about a fellow retreating to the vinyl collection in his man cave, or “What Do I Tell the Children?” in which a father wonders how to advise his offspring about being good in a world where corruption seems so rewarding.
That last, sung with faultless sincerity by the engaging Darius de Haas, is perhaps the most deeply moving, number, but, for me, at any rate, the pièce de résistance, if there is one in this barrelful of takeaways, is “Done.” It’s about as magnificent an expression of what a veteran entertainer must endure to get a gig—auditioning and rejection—only for that magic moment when a stranger’s words of admiration for a forgotten performance instantly blow away the clouds of anger and the pain. And the lanky Lynne Wintersteller, who displays a remarkable vocal range, delivers it with glorious honesty and joy.
The cast displays great versatility in bringing each song to life, investing Maltby’s witty, touching, and insightful lyrics with both charm, perception, and perfect diction. Shire’s music, while more supportive of the intellectual purpose of a song than self-servingly melodic, is the perfect complement to the words; you may not leave humming the tunes but you won’t quickly forget what the songs are saying.
PS: I suspect that the more senior you are the more the show’s time-related themes will affect you. The night I attended, David Shire’s wife, actress Didi Conn, was there. She was a theatre student at Brooklyn College when I was a professor there. Didi was so unique that I remember today a conversation we had in 1975, just after I’d returned from sabbatical and she was on the verge of leaving for training elsewhere. I’ve run into her once or twice since then, but greeting her again at her husband’s show after that first meeting fifty years ago stirred feelings of time’s passage deserving of a song only Maltby and Shire could write. I guess, in the end, it is all about time.
About Time is playing now through April 5th at the Marjorie S. Deane Little Theatre, 10 W. 64th Street, NYC.
Photos by Julieta Cervantes.
Headline photo: Daniel Jenkins, Allyson Kaye Daniel, Eddie Korbich, Sally WIlfert, Darius de Haas, and Lynne Wintersteller.
