If you’re not a musical-theater fanatic, you’ve probably
never heard of Richard Maltby, Jr. and David Shire.
But if you enjoy theater songs, or just about any kind of songs, you definitely
need to make their acquaintance. Everyone’s Theatre Company is providing a very
entertaining survey of this team’s stellar work in the revue “Closer Than Ever,” which opened last Saturday and continues this
weekend.
Maltby (the lyricist) and Shire
(the composer) have collaborated since the 1950’s, but they have probably been
more successful on their own than as a team. Maltby
won a Tony for directing “Ain’tMisbehavin'”
and also wrote lyrics for “Miss Saigon”; Shire is an Oscar-winning movie
composer. As Maltby and Shire, they’ve written two
musicals that made it to Broadway — “Baby” and “Big” — and a bunch of others
that didn’t. This sizeable catalogue has been mined for two revues: “Starting
Here, Starting Now,” from 1977, and “Closer Than
Ever,” first produced in 1989.
But if it’s true that unsuccessful shows can contain plenty
of gems, “Closer Than Ever” is a jewel box: an evening
of terrific songs with Shire’s driving, tuneful music and Maltby’s
witty, pointed lyrics. I have to tip my hat to a writer who rhymes “Prelude”
with “Quaalude.” During the comedy numbers, you may find yourself leaning
forward in your seat so that you’ll catch every word — including a few 1980’s
references that are wisely unchanged.
The songs are drawn together by a
theme: opening the doors that life puts in front of you and dealing with
whatever you find behind them. So the first song is literally an opening
number, with the performers entering from four brightly painted doors and
singing about life’s possibilities. The songs that follow explore many of the
possibilities, and despite their various sources, they hang together nicely.
The subject matter is often pretty everyday — longtime
friendships, marriages, second marriages, children, aging parents — but this
team mines familiar subjects for emotions and situations you don’t always find
in theater songs. They’re also emotions and situations best appreciated by
people who have seen a bit of life, which gives “Closer Than
Ever” a sense of unity and a pleasingly adult air. This is no Disney musical.
Maltby and Shire’s songs are so
well executed, and they present characters and dramatic situations so
effectively, that they are tiny book shows in themselves. That is certainly
true of such “Closer Than Ever” numbers such as “What
Am I Doin’?” (a scary-funny
portrait of a young man “out of his mind with love”), “The Bear, the Tiger, the
Hamster, and the Mole” (a diatribe on animal reproduction delivered by a
scientist considering conceiving a child without a husband), and “Life Story”
(which is, well, the life story of a woman, from the 60’s to the 80’s).
The writers’ excellent teamwork on the
page is matched by the performers’ teamwork on the stage, provided by a cast of
just four nicely contrasted singer-actors: Lance Anderson, Ruth Bellavia, Jeff Clair, and Laura Marron.
(Robert Sharman also helps out in a couple of numbers.) While the show is
billed as “a concert presentation,” and a few numbers are delivered standing at
music stands, Billy DeMetsenaere’s direction keeps
all the performers pretty busy.
All of the cast members get several chances to shine as
soloists. Clair is dandy as the manic young man in the “What Am I Doin’?” song mentioned above, and a bit later in the more
reflective “One of the Good Guys.” Anderson does a simple, moving job on “If I
Sing” (both Maltby and Shire’s tributes to their
musician fathers), and Bellavia tells her “Life
Story” engagingly and mines some heavy emotion in “Patterns,” similar to
Sondheim’s “Losing My Mind” and equally as lacerating.
Marron has a natural “show voice”
and is the most outgoing of the group; she has the show’s comic highlight, “Miss
Byrd,” a sexy number about a receptionist who enjoys certain on-the-job perks,
in which Marron works most of the stage without once
leaving her swivel chair. Marron and Bellavia’s voices combine to make some gorgeous music in
“It’s Never That Easy” and “I’ve Been Here Before” — a medley that is like a
three-minute pop opera. (I wish more pop operas were three minutes long.)
Maltby and Shire’s songs are the
kind of material musical-theater actors live to take on, and everybody in ETC’s
“Closer Than Ever” seems to be having a great time
doing so. I wish more groups did this show; you will be glad that ETC is giving
it a try, and probably go home afterwards and order the album.
This article appears in Apr 2-8, 2014.
