Theatre in Review: Myths and Hymns (Prospect Theatre Company)The bad news is, ever since winning his Tony for The Light in the Piazza, Adam Guettel has sadly been MIA. In a recent interview, he indicated that he had been working on a musical based on The Princess Bride, a project that eventually fell apart. The good news is, he is busy at work on a trio of shows. The pretty good news is, while we're waiting for them to show up, Prospect Theatre Company is filling the gap with a new production of Myths and Hymns, Guettel's 1998 song cycle, formerly known as Saturn Returns. The name change is apropos, because this is an entirely new approach to material previously been seen only in a concert format. Elizabeth Lucas, who also directed, has invented a narrative of sorts to tie the songs together. The setting is a house by the sea; an elderly woman, her speech impaired, apparently by a stroke, is being forced to vacate her home. While her adult daughter plaintively urges her cooperation, she barricades herself in the attic, where she finds herself surrounded by objects, each of which triggers a specific memory. She recalls the rhapsodic early days of her marriage, and her joy in having a little boy and a girl; later, her little paradise is roiled by change as the children mature and her sternly Christian husband tries to keep them all under his control. He excoriates his daughter when he catches her with her lover, and treats the son even more furiously when he finds him in another boy's embrace. Tragedy strikes -- the son dies young, the father soon follows -- leaving the woman to face a lifetime of unresolved feelings. The songs of Myths and Hymns (a couple of which have lyrics by Ellen Fitzhugh) are explicitly religious meditations; some are Christian, others are rooted in classical myths. Their lyrics are often elliptical and the oddly angular melodies, which spiral up into the stratosphere even as darker emotions lurk underneath, have an uncanny ability to summon up deep, almost ineffable, emotions. Even so, Lucas has been fairly adept at finding the right number for each character. "Pegasus" and "Icarus" are assigned to the son, whose youthful exuberance comes to an end all too quickly. "Come to Jesus," an epistolary song for ex-lovers ruminating on an imminent abortion, is used to define the daughter's relationship with her sometime beau. "Hero and Leander" evokes the early joy of the mother's marriage. Each of them fairly radiates with complex feelings; music is skillfully used to express what cannot be put into words. This is, of course, the backward way of constructing a musical, and, in her desire to accommodate all the songs in the playlist, Lucas hasn't been able to prevent the last quarter of the show from dragging a little bit. At times, the songs, which were written for another purpose altogether, seem a little too highfalutin for the rather ordinary situations depicted here. And there are also some choreographic interludes by Wendy Seyb -- especially a male pas de deux for the son and the boy he fancies -- that could have been dispensed with. But for the majority of its running time, Myths and Hymns provides a touching inventory of one family's hidden hopes and secret sorrows, culminating in an authentic affirmation of grace. The cast, a mix of familiar faces and newcomers, seems right at home with this challenging material, proving adept at tracing the complex emotional geometry of each number and singing heroically, to boot. Bob Stillman -- a veteran of this material, having appeared in Saturn Returns at the Public Theatre in 1998 -- makes a fine patriarch, his boyish love of propriety turning to bitter rage as his children get older and elude his grasp. Anika Larsen does double duty as the daughter in her lovelorn youthful incarnation and as her sadder-but-wiser older self; she does especially well by "Life is But a Dream," and "How Can I Lose You?", two of the more conventional songs in the score. It seems almost wasteful to cast Linda Balgord as a character incapable of speech (and, therefore, song), but she finally manages to soar in her one number, "Awaiting You." Lucas Steele brings an almost painful, heart-struck innocence to the son, whose joy is so sadly short-lived. The production design is a combination of the spare and the sophisticated. Ann Bartek's attic setting places a number of cardboard boxes and mismatched chairs on a small array of levels; late in the show, there is an imaginative effect when an enormous swath of blue China silk is pulled from a box, and, covering the stage, becomes a vast ocean. Emily Morgan DeAngelis dresses the cast in simple casual wear for the most part. On the other hand, Herrick Goldman's lighting uses a number of techniques to cannily keep track of a variety of emotional states. Working from a variety of unusual angles, his saturated colors and dense patterns serve to heighten the haunting quality of each number. He also makes good use of the domed ceiling -- the production is staged in the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew, on West 86th Street -- treating it with jewel-like patterns at certain moments of high exaltation. The sound design, by Janie Bullard, uses a variety of by-the-seashore effects to create a strong sense of place; the vocal reinforcement is well-done, too. There is a sense in which Lucas' approach is counterintuitive; some may feel that it weighs down Guettel's songs, robbing them of their mystery. But, by and large, she has used them effectively to assemble a gallery of compelling family portraits. And, until we get Guettel's next new effort, these songs are well worth a listen.--David Barbour 
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