Zorba
Book by Joseph Stein. Music by John Kander. Lyrics by Fred Ebb. Adapted from Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis. Directed by Richard Sabellico. Musical direction by Darren Cohen. Choreography by Danny Buraczeski. Set by Jim Morgan. Costumes by Gail Baldoni. Lighting by Kendall Smith. Sound by John Stone. With Ron Holgate, Anita Gillette, Franc D’Ambrosio, Glory Crampton, and Natalie Toro. At the North Shore Music Theatre through October 21.

In 1966, for the celebrated team of Kander and Ebb, life was a cabaret. Two years later, it had become " where you wait while you’re waiting to leave. " Perhaps it was this mordancy that caused the 1968 Zorba, which ran on Broadway for less than a year, to be less spectacularly successful than Cabaret. Still, you had to hand it to a Broadway entertainment of 30-odd years ago that had the balls to lead with so depressive a sentiment — as if to say that, no matter how much larger than life our central character is, the Reaper is bigger.

Revived at the North Shore Music Theatre, however, Zorba proves to have greater flaws than mordancy. And the production has one fatal one. The show boasts a catchy little number called " No Boom Boom " ; here, alas, there’s no Zorba. In the role of the Greek life force immortalized by Nikos Kazantzakis in his 1952 novel Zorba the Greek, Tony winner (for 1776) Ron Holgate is an affable and gangly rogue. But he lacks the lusty charisma necessary for this Herculean figure, who across the years has been compared with Sinbad and Falstaff. More effective is Anita Gillette in the role of the aging floozy who makes Zorba her last hope for legitimacy. Gillette’s petite, hip-swinging Hortense is playful and pathetic at once, a Miss Havisham of the strumpet set who, albeit cinched up in old ruffles, has not completely lost her sizzle.

Zorba is an awkward albeit daring package: a Broadway musical with operatic themes, among them the intricate dance of life and death. Of course, there is no way the show can live up to Kazantzakis’s elegantly written, elemental novel — any more than Man of La Mancha does to Don Quixote. From Kazantzakis, the musical borrows its all-embracing title character and some bits of plot, hammering them into parallel love stories, both ending not at the altar but by the River Styx.

As in the book, the narrator character (here called Nikos but inexplicably made an American) picks up the old pirate peasant Zorba at the port at Piraieus and takes him with him to Crete. The scholarly Nikos has inherited an abandoned mine, which he intends to get going again. Zorba, who advertises that anything he knows how to do he does perfectly whereas anything he doesn’t know how to do he does very well, will be his foreman. He will also, of course, teach his wet-behind-the-ears, book-dependent boss about LIFE. The musical is presided over by a black-clad vulture of a chorus leader (Natalie Toro), sort of a cross between Cabaret’s sinister MC and Judith Anderson. And it concentrates on Zorba’s humane seduction of the elderly French courtesan Hortense and, more sketchily, on the cautious Nikos’s eventual surrender to his attraction to a beautiful Widow who’s hated in the small Cretan town for scorning a young man who then committed suicide.

Ultimately, the mix of sex comedy and melodrama, Broadway and bouzouki, proves edgy but unwieldy. What the show has going for it, as do all Zorba treatments, is the brimming title character. But in the musical, and particularly in Holgate’s insufficiently compelling characterization, Zorba, proffering fortune baklava like " Logic is a woman’s backside, " seems more of a charming old lecher and con man than a Dionysian embodiment of life unencumbered by fear. (It is telling that a 1983 Broadway revival that featured quintessential Zorba Anthony Quinn ran longer than the original production, which starred Herschel Bernardi.)

Zorba has no showstopping tunes, but its Greek-tinged score seems of a piece and offers some pretty interlaced melodies, among them " The Butterfly, " which is lushly sung here by Franc D’Ambrosio as Nikos and Glory Crampton as the Widow. And Gillette, endearing with her rouged face and mincing trot, does well by Hortense’s frisky yet plaintive numbers, including her recollection of the glory days when she kept Crete safe by sexually placating four warring admirals. (There is a whiff of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, though, to the character’s rising from her deathbed to relive her 16th birthday.)

The ensemble numbers work less well, with the chorus of stereotypical Cretan villagers herded on to frolic or menace as needed. And for a show whose title character dances his deepest emotions, this one offers little to dance about and does its own hoofing by the folk-book rules.

Issue Date: October 11 - 18, 2001