Arena Stage: Unknown Soldier

 Modern Musicals can be very unfulfilling.  They reach for unconventional themes and often the music seems like more of an afterthought.  You realize this when you reach a point where you can't tell if the present number is rehashing the melody from the previous song, or some other song, or maybe its a reprise of some other song... In the moment there's nothing wrong with the song.  And once the moment is gone so is the song.

As to the story...Let me start with a quote from one of the authors: "When Michael Friedman and I set out to write Unknown Soldier, we were interested in figuring out how the past and the present merge, how objects trace through time, and how your history is more fluid than you think and your futures less of a mystery than your past." - Daniel Goldstein  It opens with a little girl writing a report on WW I.  She is being raised by her cruel and embittered grandmother, her father having disappeared and her mother having died in childbirth.  Suddenly cut to the present, this same little girl all grown up 40-something, having just inherited the home she grew up in as her grandmother has died.  In cleaning, she discovers an enigmatic old newspaper clipping from 1920, that her grandmother had saved and on a whim contacts an archive help line at Cornell University where she makes the acquaintance of a repressed, nerdy research assistant.  As he agrees to help her solve the mystery of the photo, the dead and former self swirl in and out of the picture in a dizzying contra-country dance of hopes and fears and lies and revelations and mostly just disappointments. I mean, how on earth could you go wrong?

Over-layed upon this amorphous, colorless landscape is a cast of actors honestly as deep and as amazing as any I have seen.  Among them: Kerstin Anderson who lead the most recent national touring companies of Broadway revivals of "My Fair Lady" (she played Eliza Doolittle) and "The Sound of Music" (yup, she played Maria).  Adam Chanler-Berat as the nerdy research assistant, his Broadway credits include originating roles is "Next to Normal," "Peter and the Starcatcher," and "Amelie."  Lora Lee Gayer as the little girl all grown up, whose Broadway credits include: "Holiday Inn," "Doctor Zhivago," and "Follies."  But the feast de la resistance for me was experiencing the amazing Judy Kuhn as the cranky granny.  Judy's credits could double the size of this paragraph, and perhaps most salient of all, she was a longtime collaborator with Stephen Sondheim.  And on and on I could go!  The eleven member cast not only brought their A-game to the stage--the are A-game actors.

So while the larger picture of the production left me wanting, the moment by moment execution was a delight.  And given the fact that I only purchased the ticket last evening when a 50-off discount offer popped up in my feed; it's not like I'd given the show much thought or really can to the theatre with any great expectations.  In other words, to experience a cost of this talent, or even just an evening with Judy Kuhn, singing the damned phone book--would have been well worth $45.  

So I will close with another quote from the Dramaturg's notes: "Yet I have wondered sometimes whether, for example, we have truly taken seriously that the intricate web of connections that characterizes any event of problem is the story." - Avery Gordon, "Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination"

Grandma Lucy Anderson (Judy Kuhn)

Ellen Rabinowitz (Lora Lee Gayer), Lucy Lemay (Kerstin Anderson), and Andrew Hoffman (Adam Chandler-Berat)

All the generations together: Lucy Anderson, Young Ellen/Lucy (Riglee Ruth Bryson), Lucy Lemay and Ellen Rabinowitz

Ellen and Andrew finally meet one another--it does not go well.

The Ensemble: Candice Shedd-Thompson, Sumie Yotsukura, Taylor Witt, Ronald Joe Williams

The Unknown Soldier (Perry Sherman)

The ensemble with the Doctor (Nehal Joshi)

The Unknown Soldier and Lucy meet.