Buried Gold

Paint Your Wagon at New York City Center

The cast of Paint Your Wagon.

            The Encores! production of Paint Your Wagon is not usual fare for the series—it usually sticks to underappreciated or very short-running musicals, categories under which the 1951 Lerner and Loewe production does not fall—but it is welcome, a brief, refreshing reminder of why we love musical theater itself. It’s also an excuse to enjoy the rollicking score, perhaps not lyricist Alan Jay Lerner’s best work (that was to come in My Fair Lady and Camelot, or past in 1947’s Brigadoon), but certainly up there for composer Fritz Loewe, whose melodies, tinged with Latin and folk influences, are orchestrated and performed extremely satisfactorily by the charismatic Rob Berman’s Encores! Orchestra.

            Paint Your Wagon was an anomaly for Lerner and Loewe, the only original musical they wrote after 1947 and their shortest-running between 1945 and 1973 (only 289 performances despite mostly positive reviews).  They were attempting, clearly, to replicate the success of the similarly optimistic frontier drama Oklahoma, which had taken Broadway by storm eight years earlier, and they did not entirely succeed, financially or creatively.  The puzzle pieces of Paint Your Wagon do make up what a musical should be, the ideal of the Golden Age.  But there are some characters who are underused (more on these later), and others who needn’t be there at all.  As a unified musical, the concept introduced by Show Boat and perfected by Oklahoma, Paint Your Wagon isn’t all the way there.  What does function pretty fantastically on its own is the score, which is wisely featured here.

            The cast of this production (which, as with all Encores! productions, runs only four days, through March 22^nd) is mostly well-chosen.  Keith Carradine delivers a marvelous turn as wandering prospector Ben Rumson, who founds the floundering gold mining town of Rumson Creek.  His voice is redolent of folk singers like Peter Yarrow, an unusual choice for musical theater but in this production, at least, a wonderful one.  It also helps to have an actor of Mr. Carradine’s caliber on hand to make sense of Rumson’s sometimes self-contradictory decisions.

            Alexandra Socha, who plays Rumson’s sixteen-year-old daughter Jennifer and the only girl in a mining camp of 700 men, has a lovely voice but isn’t great with the comic frustration necessary to pull off the part.  (Betty Hutton could have done it, if cornily, or, come to think of it, the young Celeste Holm, who played a character very similar to Jennifer in the aforementioned Oklahoma.)  Ms. Socha is a little awkward and a little under-rehearsed on the stage, and the fact that her underage character is subject to an uncomfortable amount of sexual attention (a predicament Lerner and Loewe approached with a great deal more delicacy in Gigi) doesn’t help matters.

            The focus here, as he should be, is Justin Guarini, who is best known for his stint on American Idol in 2002.  He plays Julio Valvaras, a Mexican miner who must live two miles from camp to avoid those who would steal his claim, and acts additionally as Jennifer’s love interest.  Mr. Guarini’s stage presence is captivating, and his voice even more so.  Only someone with his felicity could deliver so beautifully what is inarguably the best song in the score, “I Talk to the Trees,” which Clint Eastwood so memorably garbled in the 1969 film version.  He is the primary character who could use some more stage time—for one, the racial implications of his dealings with Rumson Creek’s townspeople are never fully explored, besides which he’s just a spectacular performer.

            But the fact remains that this score, delivered by a marvelously earnest ensemble, talents all, is an attraction all by itself.  “Wand’rin Star,” “They Call the Wind Maria,” and the mindworm “I’m On My Way—” all these from a musical un-revived now for nearly 65 years.  Lerner and Loewe, the most underrated songwriting team of the Golden Age (what recognition they have achieved, mostly for My Fair Lady, is not near enough), were masters of their crafts, and in Paint Your Wagon as ever, they deliver a score that reminds us why, cliché as they are beginning to seem, classic musicals in all their deeply felt glory are a necessary stimulant for getting through life.