Anyone who loved Larry Shue’s “The Foreigner,” a few seasons back, should probably dash off to see “Birds of Paradise,” which opened last week at the Promenade Theater to some very cross reviews. A warm, sweet, funny musical about an amateur theater group rehearsing a version of Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” “Birds of Paradise” has a book and songs by Winnie Holzman and David Evans (she’s words, he’s music), and an eight-member cast of superlative charm directed by Arthur Laurents, and it is the wittiest little musical I have seen in ages.
“Birds of Paradise” is a lot like “The Foreigner”—which also opened to some very cross reviews, and which ended up running a year and a half. It has the same zany, unpretentious innocence and spirit of fun that made Mr. Shue’s play such a joy, the same surface dumbness modestly glossing over what is actually a very clever idea. It’s full of things that you find yourself laughing about days later: the discussion of the bird-of-paradise image at the end of Act I, or the penguin number at the beginning of Act II.
The cleverness begins with the notion of using “The Seagull” as the basis for a contemporary plot—not just any old Chekhov play but the one that people remember best, whether they realize it or not. Nearly everyone remembers the opening exchange, for instance (“Why do you always wear black?” “Because I’m in mourning for my life.”), or the last line (“Konstantin’s shot himself”). Most of all, one remembers the scene where Konstantin drops a dead bird at Nina’s feet—and the way the ungainly image keeps coming up, again and again.
“Birds of Paradise” is about fools and madmen: Homer (Todd Graff), the temperamental composer-lyricist who has written a futuristic musical adaptation of “The Seagull,” Lawrence Wood (John Cunningham), the Broadway has-been who thinks his visit to Harbor Island (“a small fictional island somewhere on the eastern seaboard”) may change his life, and who becomes infatuated with Homer’s musical when he hears Julia (Crista Moore) singing it; Julia herself, who becomes infatuated with Wood, to the distress of Homer and his mother. As the action in “Birds of Paradise begins to echo the events in “The Seagull” you find your perception of Chekhov changing, like the ever-changing backdrop of Philipp Jung’s ingenious set. A stylized evocation of the view from the disused church where the play is being rehearsed, it seems to be made up of a series of scrims, thickly painted to look now like Monet’s “Water Lilies” and now like the sedgy moss a the bottom of the ocean, depending on what light is being cast on them; and depending on the light, the view, like the play, goes back and forth between a two- and a three-dimensional world. It can take on a realistic feeling of depth and perspective or the dull flat sheen of a beautiful piece of Chinese silk.
“Birds of Paradise” would be worth seeing if only for that magical set, but everything about it is good. Miss Holzman and Mr. Evans have provided just the right number of funny, wistful, and stirring songs in the right combination. Michael Starobin’s bright orchestrations and Linda Habermabn’s staging can transform a fictional “bad” number into a good real one without our ever knowing how. Jules Fisher’s lighting deftly steers us away from taking the action in the play too literally. And the show is perfectly cast: Mary Beth Peil as Marjorie, the Arkadina figure; Donna Murphy as Hope, the radical feminist Masha; Andrew Hill Newman as Dave, the ineffectual young man whose bad, derivative musical the company is rehearsing at the beginning of the evening; J.K. Simmons as Andy, the inarticulate auto mechanic who longs for more out of life; and Barbara Walsh as Stella, his seemingly vacant wife. Mr. Graff and Miss Moore, as the juvenile leads, are particularly endearing, but it’s Mr. Simmons who brings down the house with his solution to the metaphor problem.
A good deal in “Birds of Paradise” might seem to put paid to the concept of dramatic metaphor once and for all: whole sequences leave you thinking you’ll never be able to take bird imagery seriously again. But it’s really themselves Miss Holzman and Mr. Evans are making fun of. Like all backstage musicals, theirs has its own overriding metaphor: it has to do with the futility of striving for transcendence and the necessity of doing so anyway.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, November 9, 1987