Violet – American Airlines Theatre, New York

Joshua Henry, Colin Donnell and Sutton Foster in Violet at the American Airlines Theatre, New York. Picture: Joan Marcus

Violet continues at the American Airlines Theatre, New York until 10 August.

Violet, the eponymous heroine of the musical Violet, tells us early on that she has a “scar that cuts a rainbow clear across my cheek”. It’s the result, we eventually learn, of an accident some 12 years earlier when Violet was 13. Violet was playing in the woodshed when the blade of an axe being swung by her father came loose and went flying through the air, splitting Violet’s face. The father carried her off – on a precarious journey from their backwoods mountain-top home – to the doctor, who sewed her up. But the accident left a scar, she tells us, that engenders “frightened looks from little girls” and “jeers” from their brothers.

But wait a minute! As hard as I may squint, I can’t see any sign of the scar on the sweetly piquant face of the wondrous Sutton Foster, who is playing Violet in this production from Roundabout Theatre Company. Violet, with music by Jeanine Tesori and book and lyrics by Brian Crawley, was an award-winning Off-Broadway musical in 1997. Last summer it was given a well-received one-night concert performance, starring Foster, in a newly inaugurated programme from Encores! celebrating Off-Broadway shows of the past. That production is the basis for the Roundabout revival, giving the show its Broadway debut.

But getting back to that scar, it’s definitely not there. Did the make-up people fall down on the job? No, wait, I get it. This is a show that’s going to ask the audience to use its imagination. Not a bad request. And that request resonates through the piece – a little more presumptuously – as the audience is asked to fill in the holes left by the script and to grasp the emotional weight hinted at and never quite realised in its various meanderings.

The show is rich with music, an amalgam of bluegrass, folk, gospel and blues. The lyrics sometimes comes across as a little repetitious and banal in laying out the hopes, dreams and fears of the singers, but for the most part, they work okay with Tesori’s distinctive and often gorgeous music.

However, using all the imagination I could muster, I could never get too involved with Violet’s story. Based on a short story, The Ugliest Pilgrim by Doris Betts, it tells of Violet’s 1964 bus trip across the Southern part of the United States, from her home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina to Tulsa, Oklahoma. There she hopes to come face to face with a television preacher/healer who will get rid of her scar and give her a “pretty face”.

Along the way, she becomes friends with two soldiers – Monty (Colin Donnell), a paratrooper with a fair share of bravura, and Flick (Joshua Henry), a black sergeant who has learned to handle himself in racist America. The friendship evolves into something like a romantic triangle, still unresolved when the soldiers leave the bus at their post, while Violet travels on to Tulsa. There she does meet the preacher, but he says that he can do nothing for her. “Your scar is already healed… You need to make your peace with that,” he tells her.

However, she does have a moment of closure – or something like that – with her dead father, when she realises he did not scar her on purpose. And with that realisation, she thinks her scar has disappeared.

But when she meets up with the soldiers again to show them her new face, she realises the scar isn’t gone at all. Nevertheless, there’s a happy ending, with the romance question resolved, and the message I guess being that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. I just wish it were more convincing.

The script is cluttered with flashbacks to young Violet (Emerson Steele) and her father (Alexander Gemignani) that don’t really fill in Violet’s personality. There’s one long sequence where the father teaches young Violet to play poker, and she then has one game with the soldiers, but that’s the end of the poker plot line. There’s a lot of commotion about the catechism book that Violet carries with her, a book that belonged to her long-dead mother. Both Violet and her mother used it as a diary, but what’s in it that makes it so important? Well, that’s anybody guess. The father’s relationship with the mother was somehow fraught, but never explained. And finally, Violet herself – for a woman raised by a widowed father on a solitary mountain-top – is able to conduct herself with a surprising hard-eyed wisdom and a knack for smart comebacks, that make her belief in the preacher’s power seem questionable. She’s not only looking for the scar to disappear, but expects, as she sings quite giddily, to gain a “pretty face” made of movie star components like “Grace Kelly’s little nose… Rita Hayworth’s skin”.

Still, the cast throughout fulfills Tesori’s music expertly, and Foster enlivens the title role with her own personal charm, and also transmits her love for the score in her performance. She and her colleagues deliver a couple of showstoppers or near showstoppers, and there’s a roof-raising ensemble gospel number that halts for a moment the questionable plot permutations and brings things to a high pitch of excitement. Leigh Silverman’s minimalist staging, with the band onstage Encores!-style, keeps things moving fluidly,

But even with all the great music and the always welcome Foster bringing her abundant but unpretentious charm to the proceedings, the slender, fuzzy storytelling keeps Violet from really blooming.

Ron Cohen

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