Lost in the Stars

Encores puts on staged concert versions of old musicals that aren't likely to have a chance in a commercial production these days. At their best, it's a chance to hear music that you wouldn't get a chance to experience live otherwise. At their worst, they're two or three hours of material that likely should have stayed forgotten. And occasionally, they're shows like On the Town that have been produced fairly recently, and there's no understandable reason they were chosen for the program at all.

I've been burned by Encores before. I wish I could forget a flu-ish Christine Ebersole squawking her way through the misbegotten Applause, a musical version of All about Eve that never should have been. Or the woefully "star" cast The Wiz in which Ashanti managed to spend two hours on stage and never once exhibit signs of personality. But I've also loved their Gypsy with Patti LuPone (which I saw at City Center three times) and Donna Murphy and Raul Esparza knocking the crap out of Anyone Can Whistle.

The more obscure the material, the less I've enjoyed the experience. So when I found out they were doing Lost in the Stars, a musical version of Cry, the Beloved Country, I was not especially enthusiastic. But I still got tickets! Because I'm way too easy to win over with a $20 seat, even at City Center where $20 lands you up about 20 flights of stairs, bobbing and weaving to see the stage between railings and the heads of other people who bought tickets before you. Pretty much the worst sight lines in Manhattan, but hey, you're there to listen really, aren't you?

Before heading to the show, I heard some negative word of mouth from the dress rehearsal. My expectations were Death Valley low. And maybe that's why I was really delighted by the material, if that's what you can call the feeling given that it's about a man who goes to Johannesburg top find his son, only to arrive too late and for his son to end up sentenced to death for the murder of a white man. It's pretty bleak stuff, and the writing is deeply unusual. The songs are often didactic and less rise out of the material than they do serve as narratives about what is happening, often in choral form, headed by the stoic "Leader" played by Quentin Earl Darrington who I loved in Ragtime.

While a lot of the material is counterintuitive (why this song? why this song now?), the music is rich, and the show is fabulously complicated. Tackling guilt and responsibility and the uncomfortable relativity of morality, it damns the apartheid system without negating the underwhelming fear and humanity of the people trapped in its admittedly repugnant spell. It's too easy to simply say that all white South Africans of the time were evil. So it doesn't. Just as it would be too simple to say that Absalom Kumalo, the convicted murderer, was all good or all bad. He is instead, truly shaken by what he has done, but never entirely forgivable.

Reviews of the show have been fairly unkind, and I understand why, though I choose to disagree. I was all too happy to forgive the scarce emotions of the piece and its strange anachronisms in order to appreciate the stunning performances of Chuck Cooper (who has a voice to rich you want to live inside of it), Patina Miller, Daniel Breaker, and the many, many other actors in small but substantial roles. It's a dream cast for a flawed piece whose riches outweigh its downfalls heavily, at least in my mind.