NEW YORK—New York City takes center stage in the very lovely, if somewhat thinly structured A Bed and a Chair: A New York Love Affair, a co-production of New York City Center and Jazz at Lincoln Center.
The presentation is billed as a special event of the popular City Center Encores! series and features more than two dozen songs by Broadway composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. All the songs have been given new musical arrangements by or under the guidance of jazz great Wynton Marsalis and put together to form a completely new show.
The story deals with a Young Woman (Cyrille Aimée) and Young Man (Jeremy Jordan) and an Older Woman (Bernadette Peters) and Older Man (Norm Lewis) and the various romantic problems each encounters. These include the fear of commitment and unwillingness to change as they try to find true love with one another.
Each of the four also has a Shadow, or nonspeaking inner self, that conveys through dance the feelings or emotions they themselves are unable to. The Shadows are played by Meg Gillentine, Tyler Hanes, Elizabeth Parkinson, and Grasan Kingsberry, respectively.
As a revue, the show works beautifully. The vocal talents of the actors work together with the actions from their Shadow counterparts.
The very enjoyable video projections by Steve Channon of different New York scenes and sights adds an extra layer of depth to the piece, and in some cases, helps to give the songs a new meaning—such as in the number “Giants in the Sky.” Originally sung by the title character in the “Jack in the Beanstalk” fairy tale from Sondheim’s Into the Woods, here it is used to represent the skyscrapers of New York.
However, as a stand-alone show, the storyline is almost nonexistent with the various characters given almost no individual personality or identity. Thus, it’s almost impossible to care about them.
It doesn’t help that the music from the onstage Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, of which Marsalis is the music director, is often far too loud, so that it drowns out many of the lyrics and thus severely hampers the overall effect.
Aimée has the most problems in this regard, but Jordan, Lewis, and Peters all face similar difficulties during the course of the performance.
Fortunately, the cast is pretty much able to rise above the inherent problems in the show, each of them getting several numbers to really stand out, if not always as the characters envisioned.
Jordan does a great job delivering the wonderment of Jack ingrained in the song “Giants in the Sky.” Aimée has fun with such jaunty numbers as “Live Alone and Like It.”
Lewis, who is an excellent baritone, beautifully presents “So Many People.” He also more than holds his own in a wonderful duet with Peters called “Rainbows,” a song about clashing dreams and reality.
As for Peters, she brings the house down several times, most notably with “Broadway Baby,” the perennial song about a girl looking for her big break on the Great White Way.
It helps that most of the songs can be taken out of their original context and stand on their own. (It would have been nice if the program had listed where the tunes first appeared.)
An integral element to each of the musical numbers are the various dance sequences that go along with vocal arrangements and performances, all winningly choreographed by Parker Esse.
Some of these high points include Gillentine showing the anger, exasperation, and disgust the Younger Woman feels as Aimée is berating Lewis in “You Could Drive a Person Crazy.” Parkinson and Kingsberry also wonderfully bring to life an all-instrumental version of “Send in the Clowns.”
The direction by John Doyle is good as far as it goes. The songs are wonderful and the new arrangements are certainly enjoyable. And Marsalis, as part of the orchestra, plays the trumpet during the performances. Yet the actual storyline of “A Bed and a Chair,” the title taken from a line in the aforementioned “Broadway Baby,” doesn’t come together as an individual work.
Still it’s an enjoyable experience with performances that make it worth seeing. The show will probably resurface as an addition to the Sondheim canon with singers and dancers lining up to give voice and expression to these wonderful tunes.
A Bed and a Chair: A New York Love Affair
New York City Center
131 West 55th Street
Closed: Nov. 13
Judd Hollander is the New York correspondent for the London publication The Stage.
