Theater Review: A Tale Of Two Cities: The Musical

It's daunting enough reading the works of Charles Dickens—at least for most readers—let alone taking one of his classic stories and retrofitting it for another medium. It's well known that Dickens was paid by the word and that he preferred, by and large, to get as big a paycheck for his work as he could manage. To distill such a book as A Tale Of Two Cities into a 155-minute musical without disintegrating the meat of the story is tantamount to suicide. This is the first place that an adaptation can go inexorably and horribly wrong under the best of circumstances, and yet it's where Jill Santoriello—the librettist, composer, and writer behind A Tale Of Two Cities: The Musical—went unquestionably right.

A Tale Of Two Cities, like most Dickens novels, trades on the writer's knack for characterization, with what seems like two entire cities' worth of characters who engender either the deepest affection or the iciest of hatred in the reader. There was, for me at least, a point in the novel when every character falls to the side, and it seems Santoriello felt the same way. While the story is, after all, about the French Revolution and the unceasing oppression of the poor by the aristocracies in both France and Dickens' native England, it is principally about a prisoner of the Bastille who, after being released following a nearly two-decades-long imprisonment, is reunited with a daughter who thought him as dead as she knew her mother to be. Dr. Manette—played by the forceful Gregg Edelman—and his daughter Lucie—played by the luminous Brandi Burkhardt—become inextricably intertwined with a French ex-patriot named Charles Darney—played brilliantly by Les Mis alum Aaron Lazar—and as the ties between England and France, father and daughter, husband and wife, change forever, the French Revolution uproots everything.

The musical finds a real villain in Natalie Toro's Madame DeFarge, whose voice carries all the anguish her character has lived through and all of the violence she visits upon her enemies. While Ernest DeFarge is more vengeful in the book, his restraint is amplified in the musical, and the choice gives the character of his wife the necessary room to blossom into something truly evil. Nick Wyman's portrayal of English spy and friend to the new citizens of liberté pays rightful tribute to Dickens' black humor and turns an otherwise devious and unappealing character into the audience's guilty ally, a trick pulled off with equal skill in Craig Bennett's portrayal of "resurrectiontist"—that is to say, graverobber—Jerry Cruncher.

But as Santoriello and those who've read the book through to the end know, there is only one main character in A Tale Of Two Cities, and the rest of the cast of Dickens' classic novel are simply Sydney Carton's background. Santoriello's brilliant spotlight of the conflicted and begrudged lawyer's assistant is masterful and insightful and infused with the kind of wit that Charles Dickens would have laughed the hardest at himself. James Barbour—of Stephen Sondheim's Assassins—plays Charles Darnay's physical and emotional evil twin beautifully, with a manner that makes the loathsome lovable and the unendurable Sydney Carton endearing. Barbour commands the show without stealing it and his performance , rather than absorbing it completely, instead reflects the spotlight onto his fellow performers. It is impossible not to laugh with Carton and pointless to hope for anything but his ultimate success.

The musical aspect follows suit with Jill Santoriello's brilliant sleight-of-hand adaption of the story, with numbers that never stall the narrative but instead imbue the story with the same effervescent detail that make the book so ingenious. If music is an sort of emotional shorthand, then songs like "Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind," "If Dreams Came True," and "I Can't Recall" act as undeniable fists that are as illuminating as they are sonorous. The power of the musical performances by James Barbour and Natalie Toro cannot be overstated, nor can the effect of Edelman and Burkhardt's "Who Are You/You'll Never Be Alone" be diminished. The cast is so perfectly populated with capable voices that it's quite impossible to invent a sufficiently varied palette of adjectives to keep from tripping over the same ones. The symphony of set design, too, is elegantly orchestrated and becoming of the turmoil they are meant to represent. Never jarring, always evocative, and truly clever, the sets do everything they are meant to do with no adverse side effects.

Good fiction, like magic, makes it difficult for the audience to see the mechanics of the trick. Charles Dickens was a master magician whose greatest feat was the grand illusion created in the pages of A Tale Of Two Cities, and Jill Santoriello's musical has not only recreated that sleight-of-hand, it is guilty of a far less obvious magic: to take a classic novel, long buried under scholarship and praise, and recall it to life.

Tags:   al hirschfield theatre, brandi burkhardt, broadway, charles dicks, gregg edelman, james barbour, jill santoriello, musical, natalie toro, review, tale of two cities

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Posted on 10/2/2008 ( Permanent Link )
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