How to condense a sprawling French classic like Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo into a little over two hours of musical theater?
You can focus on the key characters and plot points, jettisoning the bulk of the details and subplots (and countless characters with them). You can write and lushly arrange refreshingly melodic songs. You can craft a dark, gorgeous set, vintage costumes, and a beautifully designed and executed production with Broadway-star singing and acting.
All good: Monte Cristo, the York Theatre’s new Off-Broadway musical by Peter Kellogg and Stephen Weiner, looks and sounds wonderful. The cast includes Sierra Boggess, Norm Lewis, Karen Ziemba, Adam Jacobs, and lots of other top-caliber talent.
Here’s the not-so-good, in order of increasing importance: shoving exposition into prosy lyrics. Compressing some plot elements so much that a viewer unfamiliar with the story might find it hard to follow. In service of fashioning comfortable musical-theater tropes, turning some of the book’s nuanced characters into cartoonish simplicities. Worst of all – and I guess for the same reason: inventing a laughably pat romantic ending that amounts to nothing less than literary desecration.
Plus ça change…
Right off the bat the show gets something right: Those were, and these are, “dangerous times.” With a “country divided,” “journalists charged with treason” and the like, France in the chaos of Napoleon’s fall, rise, and fall resembles our own time not a little. Theatrically, “Dangerous Times” sets a mood of political drama that resembles that of Evita.
Norm Lewis (photo by Shawn Salley)
But what defines the tuner’s tone more accurately, as it turns out, is the first romantic number, “You Guide Me Home,” in which Edmond Dantès, the future Count (a solid Adam Jacobs in brilliant voice), proposes to his beloved Mercedes. If Mercedes’ merits are of anything like the caliber of Sierra Boggess’ soul-gripping, precision-modulated vocals, who wouldn’t propose to her?
In fact the musical proceeds to make Mercedes much more of a focus than she is in the novel – right to its execrable ending.
As in the book, Edmund (here in anglicized spelling) is whisked off to jail on what was to be their wedding day. He’s been set up by his jealous shipmate Danglars (James Judy), who later becomes a financier, and Fernand (Daniel Yearwood), Edmund’s rival in romance, later a war hero who becomes a (real) Count.
The pair plot their evil deed in a borderline-hokey number called “One Small Thing.” Enabled by the deceit of the local prosecutor, Villefort (a glorious Norm Lewis), their betrayal, and the setup for Edmund’s ultimate revenge, is complete.
The Innkeep and the Abbé
Thrust into a dreary prison for reasons unknown to him, Edmund sings a plaintive “Is Anyone There?” The song being merely serviceable, my distractible brain couldn’t help tumbling to “Is Anybody There?” from 1776. But Jacobs’ impassioned delivery at the climax brought me back.
Danny Rutigliano is a fusebox of energy throughout the show as Caderousse. But the character is most unfortunately rendered here as a comic and submissive Sancho Panza-type rather than the novel’s gruff, cowardly yet threatening grump. Rutigliano also ably plays the Abbé Faria, Edmund’s fellow prisoner who, over the course of 18 years in their dank cells, educates Edmund in world culture and eventually leaves him the key to the vast treasure he has secreted on the forbidding isle of Monte Cristo.
The Abbé’s comically clever number “You Sent Me This” is a highlight of Act I. The show makes of him more of a joke than I would have liked, but not as egregiously as it does with Caderousse.
Sierra Boggess and Adam Jacobs (photo by Shawn Salley)
Boggess is wonderful singing the fine melody of “This Stupid Heart of Mine.” Karen Ziemba as Caderousse’s wife La Carconte is equally good, and very funny, in her parallel number, “This Stupid Man of Mine.” The synched songs with obverse meanings create just one example of the show’s flowing integration of simultaneous and handoff scenes and numbers. Director Peter Flynn and choreographer Marcos Santana make these inventive manipulations flow beautifully throughout.
Memorable Songs
Lewis towers with the regretful Villefort’s “A Great and Noble Man,” despite some clunky lyrics. Music writer Stephen Weiner is at his best in the bracing ensemble number “He Calls Himself the Count of Monte Cristo.” Eugénie (Kate Fitzgerald) and Albert (Jadon Lopez), the next-generation subplot couple, deliver a winning “What If There’s More than This?” – but outside that number, the show takes the easy way out by depicting the former as something of a ditz.
In the novel Eugénie has an implied romantic bond with her (female) friend and music tutor, a minor character understandably absent from the musical. The show redirects that story element into an attraction for the mysterious and exotic Haydee (Stephanie Jae Park), the Count’s ward/mistress/adopted daughter (the relationship is uncomfortably unclear, both in the novel and in the show). In parallel with Albert’s own attraction to Haydee, the whole thing is played for laughs.
Daniel Yearwood and Stephanie Jae Park (photo by Shawn Salley)
That’s in contrast with Haydee’s own tale, rendered by Park intently and sensitively in “Haydee’s Story,” the show’s darkest number and one of its best.
Park is also good holding her own with Boggess – not a given – in another cleverly parallel number, the delicate and lovely “It’s Not What You Think,” another high point. And in still another good duet, “Goodbye,” Edmund and Mercedes part.
But then – there’s that ending. I won’t spoil it. I will tell you that it partly spoiled for me this superb production realized by a veritable symphony of stage talent.
Monte Cristo is at the Theatre at St. Jean’s through April 5. Tickets are available at the York Theatre website.