Julia Murney, David Hyde Pierce and Frankie Seratch in The Landing at the Vineyard Theatre, New York
The Landing continues at the Vineyard Theatre, New York, until 24 November.
Two wins out of three isn’t bad, and that’s the score I’ll give to the new Off-Broadway chamber musical The Landing, consisting of three one-acts, from the team of Kander and Pierce.
Kander and Pierce, of course, doesn’t have the same resonance for musical buffs as Kander and Ebb, whose work ranges from Flora, the Red Menace, their very first, to such mega-triumphs as Cabaret and Chicago. Lyricist Fred Ebb died in 2004, and The Landing represents composer John Kander’s first full collaboration with another songwriting partner. Supplying both the book and lyrics for the piece is the emerging playwright and fiction writer Greg Pierce. There’s some half-century in age between Kander and Pierce, but they make a promising pairing, and it’s good to know the two have a second musical already in development.
Kander has said that after the Broadway blockbusters he helped create, he wanted to work on something small. He certainly has done that with The Landing, but the show, in addition to its miniature dimensions, is, for the most part, affecting and entertaining. It‘s staged with finesse by Walter Bobbie and performed with fine feeling by the four-person cast, headlined by Broadway and TV favourite David Hyde Pierce (who happens to be Greg Pierce’s uncle) and accompanied by a four-piece band. Furthermore, in its final section, a playlet entitled, like the overall show, The Landing, the book packs a hefty emotional wallop. It also carries a supernatural twist but is laced with very human emotion. A gay couple, played by Pierce and Paul Anthony Stewart, fulfill one of their dreams by adopting a child, but the 12-year-old boy (Frankie Seratch) who enters their life is something other than what he seems, and the story ends on a chilling note that’s heart-wrenching as well.
The opening sequence, entitled Andra (short for Andromeda), spins another touching tale. A lonely young fellow, played by Seratch, is taken under the wing of a friendly carpenter (Stewart) redoing the kitchen of the family home. The carpenter inspires in the kid a love of astronomy and the myths that accompany the starry constellations, but the telescope he gives the boy leads to a painful discovery. Julia Murney, the fourth member of the cast, plays the boy’s mother, and Pierce serves as a well-spoken narrator.
In the middle piece, entitled Brick, the mood lightens, but it seems overly determined to be funny without much success. Seratch is staying with his uncle and aunt. (The show demands an awful lot from the young Seratch, and while his tool box as an actor doesn’t seem yet to provide all the variety his three heavy roles could use, he carries on admirably.) His aunt is obsessed by the old-time crime movies she watches on television, and when a commercial offers bricks from the garage that was the locale of the famed St Valentine’s Day Massacre (a bloody episode in the underworld annals of Chicago), she orders one. The brick turns out to have a gangster-like persona in the form of Pierce, who totally takes over the aunt’s body and mind.
The piece gives Pierce and Murney, as the aunt, a chance to do some slinky, fast-stepping dancing, and Stewart displays versatility playing a number of cartoon-like folks in addition to the uncle. With some rollicking notes provided by Kander, Brick verges on opera buffa, but in total it comes across as more chaotic than side-splitting.
Overall, Kander’s music for The Landing doesn’t have the insistent and irresistible phrasing that marks his most dynamic Broadway scores, but it’s often quite lovely and tuneful, and that last playlet of the evening ends with an absolutely gorgeous love song. So, this Off-Broadway offering, despite its shortcomings, happily adds up to still more kudos for Kander.
Ron Cohen
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