What’s to come of musicals after the young guns have taken over? In terms of new musicals, everything of late has been trending towards young characters. The trend started with A Chorus Line, was brought back to prominence by Rent, and recently bombarded Broadway with Spring Awakening, In the Heights, and the now-closed Passing Strange and [title of show]. I’ve always had a probably irrational bias against musicals, perhaps brought on by being a lifelong New Yorker seeing my theater scene invaded by out-of-towners coming to see Les Miz, Phantom, Lion King, Wicked, and nothing else.
A few years out of this city will clean that palate, and after seeing some fantastic Chicago takes on the genre (including one, The Adding Machine, which I actually saw in New York City), I returned to New York in the fall committed to overcoming my bias once and for all. Perhaps the fact that I passed A Tale of Two Cities on the way to the 45th Street Theater to see Villa Diodati (the last performance was Oct. 4) was a bad sign. But I could hardly have made a worse choice for the only New York Music Festival show to see. With young energy suddenly emerging in musical theater, Villa Diodati seemed at least 50 years out of date.
It’s hard to do period pieces with a straight face anymore, and with Collette Inez and Mira Spektor’s book injecting some contemporary touches of emotion and lechery into the lives of Mary and Percy Shelly and Lord Byron, you’d think Villa Diodati would at least have a sense of humor. But it has none, instead trying to create a big romantic spectacle about a subject that’s tragic, but not all that romantic. The result is an utter slog, maybe the longest 80-minute play I have ever sat through.
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