Theatre in Review: Fly by Night (Playwrights Horizons)

	Adam Chanler-Berat, Allison Case. Photo: Joan Marcus

When the magic finally happens in Fly by Night, it arrives with a blackout. It is November 9, 1965, and, as darkness falls on New York City, this tangled tale of mismatched lovers comes to a halt. We are plunged into gloom, and then, courtesy of set designer David Korins and lighting designer Jeff Croiter, new illumination is provided by hundreds of tiny white bulbs, representing the starry sky, covering the proscenium, walls, and ceiling of the auditorium. It's a lovely, revelatory moment: In a city where usually one can barely see the sky for all the light pollution, the entire galaxy is suddenly put on glorious display.

This is followed by the show's best number, delivered by Peter Friedman as a middle-aged widower who, for most of the show's running time, has been trying to find someone to listen to the story of how he met his beloved late wife. (Everyone who knows him has already heard it ad infinitum.) The song is called "Cecily Smith," and it recalls his blind date, just after the war, with a young woman who takes him to a performance of La Traviata. He hates opera -- or so he thinks -- until he learns that the music matters not at all when the right person is sitting next to you, holding your hand. (Needless to say, La Traviata becomes a lifelong obsession.) It's a real charmer, delivered by a pro who knows how to take an entire audience into his confidence.

It is also one of the very few moments when Fly by Night's notion about the general interconnectedness of all things pays off. Like the similarly troubled If/Then, Fly by Night is preoccupied with matters of chance and choice, and whether, when one is facing a fork in the road, it is destiny or randomness that rules. But, also like If/Then, Fly by Night fails to provide intriguing people or choices, leaving us with a lumbering, contrived plot structure that wears out its welcome before long.

Fly by Night reveals its cosmic pretensions with lyrics about "instants, moments/one flickering flame of light," in its opening number; then it heads off to a funeral, in Brooklyn, for the aforementioned Cecily. Her husband is devastated; her son, Harold, heads off to Manhattan for a career making sandwiches in a deli. There, he meets Daphne, a perky blonde from South Dakota, who, having conquered her local community theatre, is ready to take on Broadway. Harold and Daphne gradually flirt their way into a romance. However, Daphne has a sister, Miriam, who works the graveyard shift (or, as she prefers to call it, the "twilight shift") in a coffee shop far out in Brooklyn, near Harold's boyhood home. (Unlike the more driven Daphne, Miriam takes an almost perverse delight in offering coffee refills for a living.) Fate throws Miriam together with a fortune-teller, who informs her that she will meet her soul mate, but he will be affianced to someone else; however, she will have ecstatic romance and will endure a great fall. This news sends Miriam spinning down the street into her coffee shop where she meets.....Harold.

Thus, Harold pines for Miriam, who flees home to South Dakota, while his relationship with Daphne slowly falls apart thanks to the demands of her career. (Daphne has been cast in a musical by Joey Storms, a neurotic writer-director-producer, the offspring of Broadway royalty, who keeps the show in rewrites and rehearsal seven days a week for nearly a year.) If any member of this triangle had even the tiniest bit of substance, this might be an engaging situation. But they are little more than blanks, whatever appealing qualities they have supplied by the actors playing them. Harold is a would-be songwriter, and he has a silly/touching number, "Circles in the Sand," with which he makes his nightclub amateur-night debut, but he spends most of the show being terminally depressed, moping about and sleeping too much. (There are plenty of sandwich-making jokes, including a running gag about a sign spelling "snadwiches," which isn't nearly as amusing as the authors think.) Daphne pretty much remains the twinkly star-to-be throughout, and there's little reason to care about her career or if she stands to be hurt by the news of Harold and Miriam's mutual romantic feelings. (Apparently, the production in which Daphne is cast lacks any other actors, musicians, or a design team; the entire Daphne-Joey Storms plot is meant to be a delightful bit of whimsy but it looks more like a blank that the authors never got around to filling in.) Miriam is less a character than a plot device, given to looking upward and musing on the stars in both the astronomical and astrological senses. (Her main number, set to a slightly poky melody, is titled, "Stars I Trust.") But there's no particular reason to believe that she and Harold belong together, except that, well, the script says so.

And there you have the biggest problem with Fly by Night: The authors, Will Connolly, Michael Mitnick, and Kim Rosenstock, are so busy fixing up their characters' destinies that there's little reason to care about them; they are little more than puppets in the hands of unseen forces. (A great deal of time is spent trying to decode the signs and messages communicated by Miriam's fortune-teller, which include the question "Do you know what it looks like when time stops?") Adding to the sense of disengagement is the presence of a narrator who keeps interrupting the action and rewinding it to fill us in on bits of plot information that have been held back for largely arbitrary reasons; there's something perverse about a musical that has to stop so frequently for lengthy passages of spoken exposition. And when the story makes a wholly unearned left turn into tragedy in the last 15 minutes or so, it's hard not to feel exasperated by the script's naked manipulations.

None of this is the fault of Adam Chanler-Berat, Patti Murin, or Allison Case, who lend Harold, Daphne, and Miriam whatever charm they have. Murin is the most vocally gifted of the three, and she makes the most of her limited opportunities, while Case has to struggle with one of the drabbest leading-lady roles to grace a musical in some time. As mentioned before, Friedman is fine, even when made to carry a turntable and record of La Traviata wherever he goes. Michael McCormick is amiable as Henry's grumpy boss, who dreams of abandoning the sandwich trade and returning to his glory days as an air traffic controller in World War II. Bryce Ryness does his best as Joey Storm, who is like no theatre professional ever. As the narrator, who also doubles in a variety of roles, including the fortune-teller, Henry Stram is forced to rely on his personal warmth to an alarming degree; he can't stop the character from being an intrusive, overexplanatory presence.

Carolyn Cantor's direction maintains a solid pace, gets the most out of the cast, and goes a long way toward keeping the action from becoming too embarrassingly twee. Korins' boxy, multilevel set cleverly makes room for an orchestra pit at center stage and also contains a charming South Dakota view and New York skyline. Paloma Young's costumes include any number of character-accurate mid-'60s styles. Croiter's lighting is unfailingly sensitive and attractive throughout. The sound design, by Ken Travis and Alex Hawthorn, has a pleasing transparency.

But there's no getting around the fact that Fly by Night is a pleasant-looking, yet largely empty-headed, entertainment, filled with talented people not shown to their best advantage. Do you know what it looks like when time stands still? The other night at Playwrights Horizons, I did -- more than once. --David Barbour