The People in the Picture

The Holocaust and comedy were integrated pretty well in Life Is Beautiful. The Holocaust and comedy AND musical theater? Shit got even trickier. But you know what? I totally dug The People in the Picture.

Musical theater's most versatile diva, Donna Murphy, is rocking every inch of said ability to move between comedy and drama, playing ugly and beautiful, young and old, vibrant and afflicted with Alzheimers. Because the people who wrote this show had the balls to have a single person play a character at the ages of roughly 30 and 80. Murphy is Raisel, an elderly grandmother in New York trying to pass along the history of the Yiddish theater troupe she was the star of to her granddaughter Jenny played by the wonderful 10 year old Rachel Resheff. Raisel's daughter, Red (played by Nicole Parker) complicates matters by being intentionally distant from her heritage.

As Raisel spins her stories of her troupe, the titular folks from the past come to vibrant life. So back and forth we go between 1977 and the late 30s/early '40s. From comedy to drama. And from Yiddish vaudeville to contemporary Broadway ballads. It probably shouldn't work. And for many, it probably won't. But what I enjoyed about this was that it presented a story rooted in the Holocaust without being "a Holocaust story." Without denying the tragedy of what happened, it manages to celebrate the persistence of storytelling and the resilience of the human spirit.

To do so, it traffics in some cliches, and some of the old-time troupe gets short shrift really just standing in as representatives of the tragedy to come. Chip Zien is wonderful in a small part even though you just sort of wait for him to get killed. Joyce Van Patten gets explosive laughs on a few lines, which might actually be her only lines. Then there's Andie Mechanic who looks to be about seven or eight and has a shockingly adult, booming, clarion voice.

Some of the numbers are expendable, notably a number called "Hollywood Blondes" that doesn't move the story forward OR provide much insight into the particular moment it represents. That said, whether the vaudevillean "The Dybbuk" and "Ich, Uch, Feh" or the contempo "Bread and Theatre" or " We Were Here," the majority of numbers score.

I worry that this show will be easy for some to dismiss because it's a little messy and walks a number of tightropes. It would be a shame if people weren't led to it. It's probably the least buzzed about musical of the year, but it (to me) is better than most--whether Priscilla, Catch Me If You Can, or even Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (which I quite liked...before I started blogging).

Really, though, if nothing else, it's a glorious opportunity to see Donna Murphy work her magic. She gets to do character work as the grandmother slowly losing her mind, show of her laser precise comedic timing in the theater numbers, and put over super emotional material like the songs "Child of My Child" in ways so clean and so specific that the whole enterprise looks effortless in spite of whiplash changes from old to young character in front of our eyes.

There's a real warmth to this show and enough genuinely pleasing about it that I was happy to forgive any quibbles, ignore any schmaltz, and just embrace it. I hope others will as well.