If/Then at the Richard Rodgers Theatre
Idina Menzel and Anthony Rapp in If/Then.
I wish so badly to have liked If/Then. Filled with beautiful voices and scenery (by Mark Wendland), the new musical from Next to Normal scribes Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey provides the facade of that intense, realistic rock musical of 2009 starring the electric Alice Ripley. This time, they have chosen for their leading woman Idina Menzel, who has a magnificent voice and is on something of a hot streak right now. Her supporting cast, including the clear-voiced James Snyder, the sporadically entertaining LaChanze, and Rent co-star Anthony Rapp, is very talented. Yet this musical has two fatal weak points--its book and its score.
The book, by Mr. Yorkey, is excruciatingly boring. It concerns Elizabeth (Menzel), an aimless urban studies major who has ended her twelve-year marriage at 39 and moved back to New York. One meaningless decision--whether to spend an afternoon with her former boyfriend, the bisexual housing activist Lucas (Rapp) or her new friend and neighbor, Kate (LaChanze)--lays out two parallel universes. In one, the newly christened Liz meets a dreamy army doctor (Snyder), has two children, and pursues a teaching career. In the other, nicknamed Beth, our heroine devotes herself to a career in city planning and starts an on-and-off relationship with Lucas. It pains me to have to explain these storylines in such detail (though the confusion of the storyline necessitates it), since they are totally uninteresting. Though the audience at the performance I attended seemed riveted (Menzel fans, no doubt), it barely held my attention. Unlike Next to Normal, in which the tribulations of a single suburban family became Earth-shattering before our eyes, there is no point in telling this story. Though at face value the production, admirably, doesn’t seem to be trying too hard, this is because it actually has nothing to say.
The score, by Mr. Kitt, is, shockingly, not great. Next to Normal’s was a pitch-perfect labor of love, each number more creative and telling than the last. If/Then has perhaps two memorable numbers. One, “Starting Over,” is momentous only because of Ms. Menzel’s soaring performance--this is her “Defying Gravity” moment of the production. The other, “Love While You Can,” is legitimately good, a tantalizing taste of what this musical could have been. The rest of the numbers all sound the same--cool-kid rock, with lots of acoustic instruments and piano, classic Kitt but without the effort. Backed by meaningless choreography by Larry Keigwin, the numbers ooze by without fanfare, tracking the unimportant story almost uncaringly. A great score can save a bad story. Unfortunately, we get no such salvation here.
The long and the short of it is that If/Then is too clever by half. The concept of the Butterfly Effect was not meant to be applied to such unimportant decisions as those that Liz and Beth make in the show. The fact is that both of their storylines end practically the same way, and could have done the same had about 40% of each plot been removed entirely. It’s a lot of fluff, and not fun fluff, either. Applying the same angst to 40s shiftlessness as they did to mental illness, Yorkey and Kitt have showed their hand. They can only tell important stories--really important stories, and if they start off with a premise that won’t lead anywhere, neither will their work. All the Idina Menzels in the world won’t save the aesthetic value of this show. It’s a shame that, in this new theater landscape, the commercial value is what counts.
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