The Fortress of Solitude – The Public Theater, New York

Kyle Beltran and Adam Chanler-Berat in The Fortress of Solitude at The Public Theater, New York. Picture: Joan Marcus

The Fortress of Solitude contnues at The Public Theater, New York until 16 November.

The Public Theater, one of New York’s most esteemed and venerable not-for-profit theatre companies has been stretching the boundaries of musical theatre for decades. In the 1960s and 1970s, it made theatrical history – and lucrative Off-Broadway to Broadway transfers – with such shows as Hair and A Chorus Line. Most recently, it scored this past season with Fun Home, an affecting family memoir of a daughter’s relationship with her closeted gay father, scheduled to move to Broadway in April 2015, and Here Lies Love, a disco-infused look at the life of Imelda Marcos, currently enjoying an Off-Broadway commercial run through 4 January (and, as you know, pulling crowds into a limited engagement at London’s National Theatre).

In its latest musical venture, The Fortress of Solitude, The Public holds to its credo. The piece is a complex, ambitious work. Attesting to the producers’ belief in it is the 18-person cast plus ten musicians. Whether it will receive the commercial embrace enjoyed by The Public’s musical smashes of the past, however, remains to be seen. The show almost suffers from too much ambition, and a lukewarm review by the New York Times probably won’t help.

Fortress is based on the sprawling 2003 novel of the same name by Jonathan Lethem. It’s a co-production with the Dallas Theater Center in Texas, where the premiere was mounted last winter. It has been in the making for a number of years, with playwright Itamar Moses developing the script, along with director Daniel Aukin, who is credited as conceiving the piece.

It tells of the friendship of two young boys – one white, one black – in the 1970s to 1980s in the New York borough of Brooklyn. The white kid is Dylan, whose ultra-liberal mother has moved the family into a predominantly black neighbourhood and then run off. The African-American kid is Mingus, whose father once had an okay but not sensational career as the lead singer in a pop-soul quartet. But it’s much more than the fact that both kids have been named after great musicians – Dylan after Bob Dylan and Mingus after Charles Mingus – that draws the two together. Dylan is dazzled by Mingus’ skill at graffiti, and they both are obsessed with comic books and super-heroes. With the discarded wedding ring of  Dylan’s mother as a talisman, they imagine they  can fly. Or is it only their imagination?

How this friendship blooms and then disintegrates – under the pressures of time and adulthood, society and personality – is the gist of the story. Drug dealing, personal ambition and violence all play a role, and as the story unfolds, we get a cultural history, particularly of the pop music, of the era, as personified in the work of Mingus’ father.

Michael Friedman’s score is wondrous with its irresistible pastiches of the doo-wop, soul and rhythm-and-blues genres. And there’s plenty of it. It‘s almost too copious, as song fragments and underscoring themes come and go, sometimes competing with dialogue and adding to the general fragmentation of the storytelling, most notably in Act I. It doesn’t help that the youngsters in that act – Dylan and Mingus as well as the neighbourhood bully, giggly girls, and another annoying white kid who moves into the neighbourhood – are all played by adults. It takes a lot of suspension of disbelief to get a handle on what’s going on.

Things straighten out in Act II, when the kids have grown up. Both Adam Chanler-Berat as Dylan and Kyle Beltran as Mingus exhibit a surer take on their roles, and by the final curtain, the guys become rather compelling characters. Dylan has become a respected rock critic and is looking to put together a CD compilation and appreciation of the career of Mingus’ father. Is he somehow atoning for letting his friendship with Mingus slip away? As for Mingus, who went into drug dealing and then into jail after a horrific family altercation, it’s been a steady descent in and out of prison.

It’s also in Act II that Friedman’s score achieves its greatest triumphs. As Dylan describes his appreciation of the recordings made by Mingus’ father, the numbers come to life in a mélange of great songs, which manage to have heart along with their pop tempos. Kevin Mambo as Mingus’ father does terrific work, and he gets grand back-up from Britton Smith, Akron Watson and Juson Williams. Later, Beltran takes to the stage, backed by a group of orange-suited convicts, to recount his journey in and out of jail and back again. It’s a riveting and massive piece of music that could well be called a rap oratorio.

Elsewhere in the show there is pungent work by Andre De Shields as Mingus’ preacher grandfather, and Ken Barnett as Dylan’s ineffectual father.

My own confusion over and remoteness from the story of Fortress in Act I might have been abated had I read Lethem’s novel. Watching the stage, I sometimes felt that I was in my own fortress of solitude. However, I also found much to admire throughout the work, enough that I feel the show should indeed enjoy some form of extended life.

Ron Cohen

www.publictheater.org/en/Public-Theater-Season/The-Fortress-of-Solitude

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