Theater Review: A pointless musical Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice

Book by Jonathan Mark Sherman

Music by Duncan Sheik

Lyrics by Duncan Sheik and Amanda Green

Directed by Scott Elliott

My main response to the new musical Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice that recently opened off-Broadway at the New Group is, why? The New Group has in recent years put out a number of pointless musicals largely designed to appeal to a nostalgic TV/movie fan niche audience (e.g. Clueless, Cyrano with Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage). There was also a clever but unmemorable Jerry Springer, the Opera that fused political themes with pop culture. Is it out of the question for musical theater to challenge or engage the heart and the brain? Obviously not, considering Sondheim and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s work. But this combination was not to be found in this musical treatment of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. This was the 1969 Paul Mazursky film that gently parodied the cultural trends of the sixties: free love (termed “wife swapping” in less enlightened times), meditation, dope smoking, self-obsession and enlightenment, etc (see famed PR photo below, with the musical update version below) . The critics of the time were divided, some seeing the film as a honest portrayal of middle aged people coping with the social changes of the sixties, others seeing it as a condescending look at such people trying unsuccessfully to look “hip”, or just a commercial film exploiting sixties stereotypes. In the film, the four protagonists try a variety of happnin’ activities, including a famous last shot of their all climbing into bed together, but rather conservatively retreat back to their flawed, if devoted marriages after all the “fun”, giving the film a strangely melancholic feel. Also, like much art of the sixties, it does not age particularly well, and things that may have seemed edgy and modern then now just look silly (e.g. bell bottoms, striped pants, Nehru jackets, Andy Warhol art).

The combination of music of the era with this plot, as well as steady nostalgia for this era, seemed to justify this musical treatment of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. The music by Duncan Sheik, unimpressive in his monotonously rock-on music for the Broadway musical Spring Awakening, here less evokes the revolutionary rock music of the sixties than the elevator music of the sixties (think Burt Bacharach). This bland, jazz-light music was beloved of my middle-aged father at the time, and I recall mostly being bored by it as a child. I was equally bored here; the music was one part Bacharach plus another part Kenny G, and lacked vitality. I would agree that it matched the plot well, since this was not about young, rebellious sixties kids, but about quasi-hip middle aged people, for whom the Rolling Stones or Eric Clapton would be less comfortable than this “hip” elevator music. But forcing us to listen to a steady diet of it for nearly two hours was a lot to ask. The band leader played, sang, and acted as a narrator, also filling in as therapist, group encounter leader, etc…a clever touch well negotiated by the dusky voiced Suzanne Vega. The action played out rapidly in front of the band, with the actors sometimes going to microphone to sing as one would in a nightclub, making the songs seem less organically linked to the plot. It was rather as if all the characters were performing for us, rather than our peeking into their lives, a leap of faith that the best musicals try to achieve. The plot of these rather hapless couples trying to be hip seemed overly-familiar, and the book failed to achieve the hard-to-achieve balance of nostalgia, camp, and sympathy that would have made all this work. We would ideally need to laugh at the characters, then cry at their failure to join the young crowd successfully, sort of a grand metaphor for aging. The musical creators tried to achieve this, but failed, largely due to the insipid music and overly-rhymed lyrics that came off as lame Sondheim or Gilbert/Sullivan. For example, one song tried unsuccessfully to rhyme “naked” with 10 other words or phrases like “make it”, “fake it”, etc.

The net result was an uneasy mix of comedy, mockery, and sympathy for the characters that never reached a true point of view. I would have more appreciated a true wallow in sixties nostalgia (with better music), or even a lacerating comic critique of the pretensions of baby boomers. But this musical, like last year’s equally pointless Clueless, seemed to try to deliver the original movie as is, just with music added. Since neither movie is an all time classic, and both are mostly beloved by niche audiences, this Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice failed to reach out successfully to new viewers and a new age, or even to older viewers who grew up in that age.