Three years before it premièred, in 1970, Benjamin Braddock sprang Elaine Robinson from her wedding ceremony with the urgency of a fireman rescuing a baby from a burning building, only to ride into their joint future with a look of numb horror on his face.
Have the marital pressures that the show examines changed in half a century? Utterly—women have allegedly been liberated; the end of men has been heralded by pundits far and wide—and, somehow, not at all.
There will be a surprise party later, but this overstuffed scene is happening inside her overstuffed mind, where the cacophony of well-wishes threatens to drown out any she might have for herself.
The first big revolution in American musicals arrived in the middle of the last century, when the revue style perfected by Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and the Gershwins gave way to the Rodgers and Hammerstein model, shows with scores that expressed emotion and songs that deepened character and progressed the plot.
In the course of the musical’s two and a half hours, Bobbie, who is seen by her cohort as a kind of willful kid, visits with her various friends and lovers, and what she observes does not tempt her matrimonial appetite.
The stage fills with substitute Bobbies: Bobbie pregnant, Bobbie with a baby on her chest, Bobbie wiping up the piss that splatters around the toilet every time Andy takes a leak.
Over the years, LuPone has concocted a signature, bouncy version of Joanne’s ferocious song, maybe to distinguish hers from that of Elaine Stritch, who originated the song and made it a classic; LuPone’s pronunciation of the words “ladies,” “caftan,” “sitting”—her pronunciation of any word, really—is, like sunrise at the Grand Canyon, a phenomenon that should be experienced in person at least once in this life.
Bobbie gets one chance to cut through the detachment that she has so carefully cultivated, and it is one of the greatest moments in musical theatre, or, you might argue—if you are feeling especially grateful to Sondheim in this newly Sondheimless world—in music or in theatre: the song “Being Alive,” a five-minute journey from cynicism to hope.
Kimberly has a deadbeat drunk for a dad , a tuba-playing nerd, isn’t afraid to march to his own beat, and he sees, in Kimberly, someone whom he might march with.
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