Paint Your Wagon – Encores! – New York City Center

Paint Your Wagon – an Encores! production – continues at New York City Center until 22 March.

Star rating: 3 stars ★ ★ ★

After Brigadoon but before My Fair Lady and Camelot, the team of book-and-lyric writer Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe explored some Americana in Paint Your Wagon, set during the California Gold Rush of the mid-1800s.

Unlike those other Lerner and Loewe works, the show was not a smash. Its Broadway opening in November 1951 was met with mixed reviews and it ran for a respectable if hardly overwhelming 289 performances. Nevertheless, the New York Times critic, the esteemed Brooks Atkinson, deemed it to be “a very happy evening in the theatre”. (Back in 1951, the New York Times was not quite the omnipotent arbiter of theatrical success as it is now.)

Judging by the current respectful mounting as the second in a three-show season at Encores!, I would say Atkinson was perhaps a bit over-enthusiastic, but not much. And that’s mainly because of the show’s glorious score, combining Wild West movie brio with the melodic lushness of Broadway’s Golden Age.

Lerner’s lyrics, for the most part, ride along smartly with Loewe’s music. And it’s performed to the hilt by a cast of strong voices along with the rapturous sound of the orchestra, over 30 musicians conducted by Rob Berman, music director of Encores!

However, more than any other Encores! production of recent memory, the show seems more like a concert than a full-blown production. True, there’s not a script binder or music stand in sight and there are lots of colourful costumes and clever set pieces moving on and off to suggest shifting locales, but the script itself – or at least the concert adaptation by playwright and novelist Marc Acito, directed by Marc Bruni – seems quite perfunctory.

There are lots of potentially interesting plot points – maybe too many – as the story unfolds of Rumson Creek, a spot hardly on a map until gold is discovered and it becomes a short-lived boom town. But nothing in the storytelling seems to take focus. The dialogue, despite the occasional joke and the assured playing of the actors, comes across mostly as filler material, there mainly to connect the musical numbers.

Ben Rumson, played with authentic grittiness by Keith Carradine, is the town’s widowed founder, concerned about his teenage daughter Jennifer, an appealingly frisky Alexandra Socha, surrounded by a population of male prospectors.

He plans to send her away to school in Boston, but Jennifer is in love with a Mexican miner of noble descent, Julio (Justin Guarini), who considers himself an outsider in the community.

There’s also a Mormon who arrives on the scene with two wives, one of whom is sold off at auction to Ben, before she runs off with an English miner. Then, there’s the flock of dance hall girls who come to town long enough to give Act II a rousing can-can number. (The lively if not electrifying choreography is by Denis Jones.)

And then there’s another miner (Nathaniel Hackmann), whose far-away wife keeps writing him to keep on digging until he strikes it rich. When he steps downstage to describe the loneliness of his life, it leads to a powerhouse rendition of one of the show’s most memorable songs, ‘They Call the Wind Maria’.

It’s in that number and many of the score’s other tunes that Paint Your Wagon becomes Atkinson’s “very happy evening”. Carradine has a string of grand solos, including: the delicate ballad recalling Ben’s late wife, ‘I Still See Elisa’; ‘In Between’, in which he humorously describes his middle-of-the-road personality to his prospective Mormon wife, and the poetic declaration of his life’s philosophy, ‘Wand’rin‘ Star’.

Socha grabs the stage in several energetic song-and-dance combos, managing even to be a bit sexy while prancing about in patched-up britches. She also shares some lovely duets with Guarini, including ‘I Talk to the Trees’ and ‘Carino Mio’.

As for Guarini, he has matured wondrously, through a series of Broadway and regional theatre jobs, from his early heady fame as a runner-up on the first season of television’s American Idol. In Paint Your Wagon, he emerges as a musical theatre leading man of the first rank, creating a genuine romantic haze around Julio, not to mention an unfailing Castilian accent and a vibrant tenor.

The ensemble, too, proves its credentials in several big numbers, such as the rousing opener ‘I’m On My Way’ and the stagecoach-greeter, ‘There’s a Coach Comin’ In’.

Lerner and Loewe certainly give a talented cast a lot to work with in Paint Your Wagon, but the show’s little gold-mining town is just overly cluttered with too many wagons of undeveloped plot.

  Ron Cohen

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