Loveless Texas – The Sheen Center, New York

Colin Barkell, Brett Benowitz and Joe Joseph in Loveless Texas at The Sheen Center, New York. Picture: Yadin Photography

Loveless Texas continues at The Sheen Center, New York until 24 September.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

The yen to turn Love’s Labour’s Lost, one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known comedies, into a musical can be a siren song.

Kenneth Branagh’s 2000 film adaptation, which remade the play into a lush old-time (and grossly under-appreciated) Hollywood musical, replete with great song standards from the 1940s and 1930s, was virtually ignored by audiences and nearly shipwrecked his movie career.

In the summer of 2013, a stage version featured an adaptation by director Alex Timbers with a score by the late Michael Friedman. (Friedman’s untimely death at age 41 just this month deeply saddened the New York theatre community. Among his other works was the score for the acclaimed Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, another collaboration with Timbers.)

The Timbers-Friedman offering turned the Bard’s characters into contemporary pop-singing just-out-of-college types. It premiered as part of the Public Theater’s annual Shakespeare season in Central Park. It was a joyful, madcap show, but a niggling review from the omnipotent New York Times may well have put a damper on further interest. However, the Royal Academy Musical Theatre department put together a London production this past June.

Now, Boomerang Theatre Company, a scrappy itinerant denizen of Off-Off-Broadway, has stepped into the breach, with its aptly-titled Loveless Texas. It’s set in Texas during the start of the Great Depression.

Since 1999, Boomerang has been mounting earnest productions of plays by masters ranging from Shakespeare to Stoppard as well as a flock of considerably less important names.

Its move into the musical arena is an ambitious one. Loveless Texas boasts a cast of 12 plus an onstage five-person orchestra, moving through some 20 musical numbers during its running time of nearly two and a half hours including intermission. Production values, by Off-Off-Broadway standards, are fairly lavish.

While the pay-off is mixed, the show certainly has its pleasures.

The book is by Cailin Heffernan, associate artistic director of Boomerang. She also directs. The lyrics and music are by Henry Aronson, who also has made a busy career as a music director on Broadway.

As in Shakespeare’s telling, the story concerns a quartet of young men who vow to abstain from romance for three years and the young ladies who motivate them to break that vow. Shakespeare, however, has the young men voluntarily giving up worldly temptations for academic pursuits. Heffernan’s plot has them forced into this predicament by economic circumstances.

Berowne (Joe Joseph) and his two buddies from college – Duke (Colin Barkell) and Bubba (Brett Benowitz) – have been living the life of Jazz Age playboys in New York and Paris. Comes the stock market crash and the boys return home to Texas, where Berowne’s extremely strait-laced brother, King (Darren Ritchie), offers them work on the family ranch. But there’s a condition. They have to sign three-year contracts which specify no contact with the opposite sex as well as a ban on various other frivolities, such as alcohol, gambling and swearing.

All this eventually comes to naught, however, with the appearance of a bevy of ladies from neighbouring Louisiana, led by the suddenly poor heiress, LaReine (Trisha Jeffrey).

They become involved with the guys because of a contested land deal between the two families. LaReine’s gal pals include Rosaline (Amanda Lea LaVergne), Kathy (Annette Navarro) and Maria (Bligh Voth).

Rounding out the cast of characters are Pastor Joe (a particularly strong John Herrera), a congregation-less preacher who becomes King’s business and spiritual advisor; Jacquenetta (Chase Kamata), Duke’s playful sister; Gwen (Kimberly Jajuan), LaReine’s watchful aunt; and Randy Costard (CJ Eldred), King’s careful-to-be-obsequious ranch foreman.

Along with the unquenchable enthusiasm of the somewhat uneven cast, the chief asset of the show is Aronson’s score. It finds a lot of musical richness in the country-western mode, which is its main colouring.

There are lilting ballads and homespun waltzes, along with forceful character songs and lively renditions of Texas swing and bluegrass. Melodies generally fit smoothly with the colloquial and sometimes poetic lyrics.

For the most part, the cast handles the demands of the music with admirable proficiency, particularly in the harmonies of the duets and full chorus numbers. However, there are moments when the Broadway belt melds uncomfortably with western twang, producing a sound that threatens to split eardrums.

The ironic problem is that the score may be too much of a good thing, over-punctuating and sometimes weighing down the unwinding of the book’s convoluted plot, as each couple wends their way to a blissful ending.

The most infectious number comes at the beginning, a terrific jazzy song-and-dance opus, deliciously redolent of the 1920s, entitled ‘This Party Will Never End’. It’s guilty of raising expectations a bit too high.

Ron Cohen

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