If/Then – Richard Rodgers Theatre, New York

Idina Menzel in If/Then at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, New York. Picture: Joan Marcus

If/Then continues at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, New York, in an open-ended run.

Remember when John Travolta mangled the name of Idina Menzel at this year’s Academy Awards? I’m sure you do. The moment has generated endless chatter and buzz for the last month or so. Anyway, the somewhat incomprehensible tangle of the Travolta tongue was an eerie foreshadowing of the new Broadway musical in which the prodigious Menzel is now starring. The show is called If/Then, and it’s a peculiarly puzzling affair. It examines the role chance and coincidence play in our lives, especially in a big city – namely, New York, of course – where a life-changing happenstance can be waiting just around a corner. It wants to be smart and contemporary, but what it seems to want to do mostly is confuse the audience. As the ensemble sings early on: “If you knew what would come what would happen/If you knew would you know what to do?” Ponder that for awhile.

It’s certainly a show that was awaited with great expectations, coming from the creators of the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning Next to Normal. They are composer Tom Kitt and book writer and lyricist Brian Yorkey, along with director Michael Greif. And to cap it all off, there’s Menzel’s name on the marquee in her first Broadway role since her fandom-building turn as Elphaba in Wicked. Her Wicked fame has now even been eclipsed by her soundtrack work for the Disney animated movie hit Frozen, with her rendition of ‘Let It Go’, the Oscar-winning song she reprised on the Academy Awards show, after Travolta’s unfortunate introduction.

In If/Then, Menzel plays Elizabeth, returning to NYC after a bad marriage to restart her long abandoned career aspiration to be a city planner. It would seem pretty challenging, to begin with, to write a musical about city planning, though it probably can be done. But Kitt and Yorkey compound the challenge, by giving Elizabeth’s New York story two parallel lives, which keep intersecting at crucial points. So that it often takes a while with every new scene in this overloaded plot to get adjusted to what’s actually happening and when and sometimes to whom.

In one life, Elizabeth becomes a highly successful career woman with a group of highly supportive best friends but no love life. In this particular life, her nickname’s Beth. In the other life, where she’s called Liz, she gives up pursuit of an active career to teach and marry a doctor, who’s attached to the US Army and who is fatally redeployed, leaving her alone with their newly born baby. Well, not totally alone, she has the same group of highly supportive friends that she has in her other life. And we have to worry about their romantic entanglements as well, which fluctuate depending on which life is being enacted.

You really need a road map to keep it straight. There are quite a few lyrics that tell us about making maps of where we work, where we play and on our hearts. Furthermore, the big mirror that takes over the top of the stage and reflects the proceedings below even carries an illuminated abstraction of the map of the New York Subway system. But none of it helps.

Despite its perplexities, the show has its assets. While the score tends to be repetitive in its abundant use of chugging rhythmic patterns in lieu of melody, the lyrics, along with their metaphysical pondering about fickle fortune and so on, are sometimes quite striking. In fact, there are two especially terrific numbers. Unfortunately, neither is given to Menzel. Rather, Elizabeth’s bisexual chum and sometimes lover from her college days, Lucas, played with easy charm by Adam Rapp, gets to sing a surprisingly tuneful ballad entitled ‘You Don’t Need to Love Me’. Then, Josh, the doctor Elizabeth marries, assayed with appealing sincerity by James Snyder, contemplates with verve and insight about their baby-to-be. The song, ‘Hey, Kid’, is reminiscent of ‘Soliloquy’ from Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Carousel, but it has its own affecting contemporary voice.

There are other noteworthy turns by LaChanze as Kate, Elizabeth’s most ebullient BF; Jenn Colella as Kate’s level-headed lover; Jason Tam as Lucas’ boyfriend, and Jerry Dixon as Stephen, Elizabeth’s sometimes boss who’s another old pal from college and a potential but married lover. Oh, then, there’s ensemble member Joe Aaron Reid, who plays the architect that Elizabeth meets, just before the plane they’re traveling on goes into a crash dive. Yes, you read me right. But I think you’ve had enough plot for the time being.

As for Menzel, she lives up to her star billing and fan adoration. She has a forthright urbane persona that wins over her audience and gives the rather colourlessly written Elizabeth – despite her use of expletives — a bit of vibrancy. And to be sure, Kitt and Yorkey have given her a full complement of big songs that let her exercise the phenomenal power of her distinctive singing voice. You appreciate her singing of them, though the songs themselves never really stand out.

It’s also puzzling that in a show attempting to celebrate New York as a locale, the sleek scene design (by Mark Wendland), attractively washed in an ever-changing array of rainbow colours (by lighting designer Kenneth Posner), frequently looks like things are taking place in some modernistic desert resort. The orchestrations (by the gifted Michael Starobin), too, with an emphasis on twanging guitars and high-stepping rhythms have an awful lot of country pop in them. I’m certainly not going to tell anyone how to write a New York-based musical, but a little homage to Gershwin or Bernstein wouldn’t hurt.

Ron Cohen

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