A Bluesy Hymn to Sturdy Values

By Michael Walsh

THE HUMAN COMEDY Music by Gait MacDermot Libretto by William Dumaresq

The line between art and entertainment is often indistinct, and never more so than in musical theater. We tend to think of opera, the sung play, as the pinnacle of a form whose lower manifestations include the Viennese operetta and the Broadway show. But such rigid categorizing is myopic. Like M. Jourdain in Moliere's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who was delighted to discover that he had been speaking prose all his life, even composers with the most commercial motives may turn out to have been writing memorable, lasting scores. Two of the most electrifying operas of the '70s, for example, were Andrew Lloyd Webber's Evita and Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd.

The latest composer to blur the line is Gait MacDermot, 55, whose The Human Comedy is currently playing at Joseph Papp's Public Theater in Manhattan. Based on William Saroyan's 1943 novel, Comedy is a sprawling, episodic work that contains 84 separate musical numbers and lasts 2 1/2 hours. MacDermot's plain, open-faced style, a melange of jazz, rock and gospel singing, is ideally suited to the sturdy values of familial love, courage and patriotism that Saroyan so sentimentally celebrated. Just as MacDermot's 1967 Hair resonated in the era of tribal-love rock, so does The Human Comedy take wing on today's prevailing conservative winds. With some reworking, it could even soar.

An idealized portrait of a small California town during World War II, Comedy (the title is meant in a Dantean rather than Keatonian sense) tells the story of the widowed Mother Macauley (Bonnie Koloc), whose firstborn, Marcus, has gone to war, leaving her to struggle along with her three other children. The family, though, is merely the centerpiece of a civic tableau; as staged, oratorio-style, by Director Wilford Leach, a large chorus sits facing the audience,with various performers stepping forward to portray schoolchildren, townspeople and soldiers. The hero is not an individual but the imaginary, indomitable town of Ithaca.

This poses a problem that MacDermot and his librettist, WilliamDumaresq, never quite overcome. Indomitability is all very well, but a concept cannot sing.

What the show needs is a firm, focused dramatic center. The Macauleys often seem like extras in their own story. Marcus' death in battle is not as moving as it should be, for instance, because the character is not introduced, except by reference, until well into the second act. And the happy-end romance between his sister (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) and a war buddy is an emotional afterthought. Further, the libretto is often awkwardly phrased and rhymed: "Don't tell me your love/ Has been killed off by time./ It can still be fulfilled,/ Fulfilled by mine."

The music is a different matter. MacDermot's stylistic profligacy is welded by an underlying bluesy harmony. This is established early in Hi Ya Kid, a wistful exchange between young Ulysses Macauley (Josh Blake) and a passing black trainman (David Johnson), and consolidated later in a gentle gospel anthem for the whole town, Beautiful Music. The pop-music style of the '40s is nostalgically evoked in The Birds, a soft-shoe love song for the assistant telegraph operator, Spangler (Rex Smith), and Diana (Leata Galloway). Most effective of all is a bittersweet canonic letter duet for Marcus (Don Kehr) and his home-front brother Homer (Stephen Geoffreys) that develops into a touching antiwar choral ode.

The composer needs to be more careful about prosody: misplaced accents make some lines sound as if they were translated from Czech. He also overuses the device of building scenes from a solo or duet into a chorus. But MacDermot's invention, which puts unexpected topspin on his melodies, his deft handling of a small pit orchestra and, at bottom, his appealing portrayal of homey virtues all add up to an evening that stubbornly sticks in the memory's ear. Which, of course, is what real operas are supposed to do. --By Michael Walsh