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[Theater reviews]

Baby steps
A little Saturday Night music from Sondheim


BY CAROLYN CLAY

Saturday Night
Book by Julius J. Epstein. Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Directed by Will McGarrahan. Music directed by José Delgado. Choreography by David Connolly. Set design by Eric Levenson. Lighting by Karen Perlow. Costumes by Stacey Stephens. With Jon Mette, Bridget Beirne, José Delgado, Bill Folman, John Michael Dias, Braden Lubell, Chris Lambrix, David Krinitt, Jackie Duffy, Mary Faber, John Porcaro, Tara Filowitz, J.T. Turner, and Paul Dimilla. Presented by SpeakEasy Stage Company at the Lyric Stage, Wednesday through Sunday through June 30.

Stephen Sondheim was wet behind the ears — but not all wet — when he penned the music and lyrics for Saturday Night. Scheduled for Broadway in 1955, the show, with a book by Casablanca screenwriter Julius J. Epstein, was scrapped when its producer died. Plans were made to resurrect it in 1959, but Sondheim, having built a reputation as a lyricist on West Side Story and Gypsy, declined. Although a few of the show’s numbers were performed across the years (several in the revue Marry Me a Little), the musical itself languished until 1997, when the folks at London’s Bridewell Theatre persuaded Sondheim to let them give it a go. The composer/lyricist himself revised the book — which remains something of a limp lollipop — and added a couple of songs for the 1999 American premiere, which was followed by an Off Broadway run in 2000. Now the 46-year-old show has found its way to Boston, where, if it will knock no one’s bobby sox off, it does serve as a worthy peephole into the development of the man who would be Sondheim (at that time still a protégé of Oscar Hammerstein II). And in Will McGarrahan’s surefooted production for SpeakEasy Stage, it’s a fond, jazz-tinged trip into a time warp. Who’d have thought there’d be a gang of New York youths who would make the Sharks and Jets look like the Manson bunch?

Revisions notwithstanding, Sondheim can’t be blamed for the airheaded plot of the show (suffice to say that the jaded bittersweetness of Follies will not be spotted here). The 23-year-old songwriter was hired to interject songs into the scenes of an extant 1929-set play by Julius J. and Philip G. Epstein called Front Porch in Flatbush about a cadre of Brooklyn guys who can’t get a date and are trying to change their lot by exercising a stock-market tip from a friend who’s a Wall Street runner. Gene, the runner, is particularly eager to ditch the old neighborhood; he spends his Saturday nights dolled up in tails trying to crash swank “shindigs.” On one of these masquerades, he meets what he takes to be a rich daughter of the Confederacy who turns out to be, like him, a kid from Brooklyn putting on airs. Young love vying with social pretension ensues, and when Gene, having spent the gang’s stock-market money, sells a car he doesn’t own, the threat of jail briefly raises its head. Meanwhile movies are attended, girls are landed, and, in the end, the neighborhood is praised in anthemic terms worthy of, though more ironic than, “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

What’s of interest here is the contribution of the young Sondheim, and even he thinks it’s not half-bad (though it could be pointed out that 1955 produced Damn Yankees). The melodies are mostly jaunty, more reminiscent of Cole Porter than of Hammerstein. And the incipient Sondheim was sharp enough to rhyme “peignoir” with “Renoir” and to put a musical make-out manual into the mouth of a New Yawk adolescent who counsels, “Ev’ry little pillow has its use —/Take it from a connoisoor,/I’m the boy who coined the word ‘Seduce,’/Not some lousy amachoor.” There are a few irresistibly upbeat chorus numbers, including “One Wonderful Day,” which features the girls duking it out against the boys in praise of marriage. “I Remember That,” for a married couple differently conjuring their first date, sounds like Sondheim, as does the torchy “So Many People,” one of the few opportunities for Elliot Norton Award winner Bridget Beirne to let loose. Forget about her letting her hair down, though — it’s slicked and pinned into a hair-don’t that’s period-perfect.

The musical performances are sound, for the most part, with Boston Conservatory grad Jon Mette 1950s-handsome and an effortless warbler as Gene and Jackie Duffy and Mary Faber doing lovable turns as flapper-clad ladies, one married, one hopeful. The date-seeking boys, led by ivory-tickling musical director José Delgado and ukulele-abusing Bill Folman, are likewise likable and in tune. And Paul Katz fields a balcony-set band that does for both the swells at the Plaza and the shlubs in Flatbush pining beneath a big yellow cookie of a moon. Was life ever this innocent? Was Sondheim?

Issue Date: June 14-21, 2001