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Music of the trite
You Never Know has more heart than legs
BY CAROLYN CLAY
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You Never Know has probably been in Tony-winning composer Charles Strouse’s drawer for a while. Now, however, it’s on the Trinity Repertory Company stage, in an ebulliently offered world premiere that accentuates the positive: the show’s interesting mix of bare-bones postmodernism and period-musical-theater style. But sometimes, actually, you do know. And that moment comes early in You Never Know, a busy musical-within-a-musical in which a 26-year-old man of today has rented a rehearsal room to present songs by his failed-composer grandfather as he himself struggles between going for the songwriting Gold and selling his soul to the American Bar Association. "Don’t give up like he did, Ben," urges an elderly Cuban performer friend of the grandfather after executing a jazzily innocuous pas de deux for janitor and broom called "Clean Sweep." Already you can see the clouds of heartfelt cliché kicking up like dust. The septuagenarian Strouse — whose greatest hits include Bye Bye Birdie and Annie — is not without ambition here, between his desire to explore the transformative power of music and the way in which his show bounces between the present and the world of the grandfather’s unfinished musical, all the while exploring parallel themes of painful love and thwarted artistry. But Strouse’s jazzily Latin-tinged songs and romantic ballads, albeit pleasant, are not particularly memorable. And the balance between embracing and ridiculing the period musical within the postmodern one proves difficult to maintain. Strouse’s show isn’t sure whether its heart’s on its sleeve or its tongue’s in its cheek. A lot of love and invention, however, have been lavished on it. How a new piece by a successful Broadway songsmith came to debut in Providence is that Strouse saw director Amanda Dehnert’s Trinity Rep staging of Annie, which emphasized the Depression-era bleakness while cutting the brassiness. Duly impressed, the composer set about working with Dehnert on You Never Know more than a year ago, and Ruby Sunrise author Rinne Groff was brought in to help shape the prone-to-confusion libretto. Dehnert is known for her innovative stagings of classic musicals, including a My Fair Lady grouped about twin grand pianos, and she’s come up with an ingenious frame for this one. The rehearsal room is backed by mirrors that reflect both the action and the audience, and on an upper level, supposedly in another studio, two dancers rehearse with a crack band who also perform Strouse’s score. The dancers too get into the act with some duets by ballet-savvy choreographer Christopher d’Amboise that, alas, suggest Jules Feiffer’s terpsichorean muse married to Oklahoma!’s Dream Curly. Engaging Trinity Rep Conservatory student Ben Steinfeld heads an energetic cast as Ben Shapiro, the aspiring musician whose lawyer dad doesn’t want him to wind up a failure like his father. At the beginning, Ben is given the unfinished script of a musical by his granddad (who had changed his name to Ben Shipley). Inspired, he and a motley crew who include an NYU musical-theater student, her smug Yalie boyfriend, their cynical tag-along, an actor who happens to be hanging around, and the rehearsal-studio security guard re-enact the piece. Set in a Miami Beach hotel in 1948, it features a womanizing aspirant to the Cabinet, his estranged movie-actress wife, a discouraged young composer playing in the hotel rumba band, and a frame-up that leads to the musician’s being arrested for attempted assassination of the vice-president. It’s all too silly to take seriously, but the way in which the yearnings of the impromptu actors and the musical’s more cardboard characters mesh is not only fun but also — given that the play-within-a-play’s a warbler — a tribute to what Noël Coward called the potency of cheap music. Strouse supplies some sweet melodies, the prettiest of which are well rendered by Haviland Stillwell, who as the theater student playing the actress boasts the purest and most lustrous tone among the singers. There’s a catchy calypso number, "De Sun, de Sea, de Sand," but it sounds like an escapee from The Little Mermaid, and there are also echoes of "Gee, Officer Krupke" and Funny Girl. Most of the actors do a game job with d’Amboise’s winking, leaping choreography — dances for dancers with more enthusiasm than skill. Whether You Never Know will dance its way out of Providence to the Great White Way is doubtful. But as the relentless optimist who wrote "Tomorrow" would have it, you never know.
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