The sexually liberated 1972 musical “Pippin” seeks to open your imagination. But when it opened at the Arvada Center with 20 dancers of varying sizes and ages peeling their cloaks and masks to reveal skin-tight, one-piece white unitards, I was begging, “Oh please no – leave something to the imagination.”
With its Bob Fosse flash and “all about me” score, “Pippin” is the (thankfully) dated embodiment of the unapologetic excess and self-absorption that defined 1970s musical theater. Go figure: It’s also one of the most popular titles in history, which is why the Arvada Center is bringing it back to life in all its gratuitous glory. The result is incongruously warm and fuzzy, and kind of icky too.
“Pippin” is the musical that dares to ask: Did princes really have identity crises in A.D. 780? The son of Charlemagne finds no fulfillment in his dalliances with orgies, war, religion, domesticity or even absolute power. So what’s a fellow to do? The authors’ answer – settling – is itself unsettling.
Stephen Schwartz’s enduring anthem is “Corner of the Sky,” a beautiful beacon that has launched any number of restless teenagers on their quests for a meaningful life. The irony is how the plot ultimately repudiates rambling rivers and yellow-brick roads everywhere.
Director Rod Lansberry’s cold steel set, bright costumes and orgiastic choreography keep pulses racing but work against the establishment of any coherent sense of time or place. Still, you have to hand it to Lansberry: It takes real talent and ample resources to pull off “Pippin” in all its vulgar glory. And these singer-dancers are top of the pole.
The payoffs are intermittent but magnificent. As our devilish narrator, the amazing Milton Craig Nealy does Broadway originator Ben Vereen proud. Veteran Jeffrey Atherton is riveting as the warmonger king who teaches his son the cruel necessities of a class system. But he does for the unitard what Jerry Seinfeld did for the puffy shirt.
Christene Paterson is a charming standout as the widow who woos our Peter Pan prince. In the title role, dour D.B. Bonds shows a terrific tenor but not much charm. His “Extraordinary” is a particular letdown.
Kitty Skillman Hilsabeck’s choreography is endlessly clever. But the night’s star by far is 76-year-old Bev Newcomb-Madden. Her Berthe is a giggling grandma who brings down the house with “No Time at All,” in which she supposes men only raise their flags in battle when they can’t raise, well, anything else. That kind of winking fun should rule the evening, but only Newcomb-Madden
and Mercedes Perez, as the lascivious stepmama, seem to be having a genuinely good time.
Lansberry’s ending is powerfully staged, but the message leaves a sour taste. Pippin’s search for a life less ordinary has led him to a horrid choice: Settling for a conventional life or commiting a spectacular suicide. Don’t both signal the death of the spirit?
The “Corner of the Sky” reprise – and who sings it – are intended to portend the resilience of the human spirit in the next generation. But we’ve just seen it smote, so its resurgence comes across instead as the return of a diseased strain that life surely will put down again. The search for fulfillment seems doomed from start to finish.
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
“Pippin” | ** 1/2 RATING
MUSICAL|Arvada Center, 6901 Wadsworth Blvd.|THROUGH MAY 14|7:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays, plus 1 p.m. Wednesdays|2 hours, 25 minutes| $34-$44| 720-898-7200 or arvadacenter.org.
