Theatre in Review: The Beast in the Jungle (Vineyard Theatre)

	Irina Dvorovenko, Tony Yazbeck. Photo: Carol Rosegg

At ninety-one, John Kander may be the youngest man in show business; in any case, he acts like it. At an age when many of his contemporaries are willing to sit back and wait for the next tribute, he remains a restless and provocative artist. Rather than rest on his laurels from Cabaret, Chicago, and a half-dozen others, he keeps composing shows that challenge the conventions of musical theatre. Consider his recent output: The Scottsboro Boys is a scathing reverse minstrel show about a notorious twentieth-century miscarriage of justice. Kid Victory touches daringly on any number of hot button issues, including child abuse, homosexuality, and evangelical Christianity. In his new show, The Beast in the Jungle, the challenges have more to do with form than content, but it is no less risk-taking for all that. And if it doesn't really work -- well, risks don't always lead to rewards.

The Beast in the Jungle is based on the Henry James novella of the same name, which may suggest the magnitude of the challenge taken on by Kander and his collaborators, playwright David Thompson and director-choreographer Susan Stroman. Opera may be another story -- there is, of course, The Turn of the Screw -- but it is fair to say that the subtlety of James' prose isn't a natural fit for the constraints of musical theatre. (Few remember Ambassador, based on a James novel, which briefly passed through the Lunt-Fontanne in 1972.) Upping the ante, Kander, Stroman, and Thompson have come up with an innovative format; billed as a dance play, The Beast in the Jungle combines narration and dramatic scenes with lengthy dance sequences.

James' story begins with a chance encounter at a party between his protagonist, John Marcher, and the faintly enigmatic May Bertram. For all he knows, this is their initial meeting -- until she reminds him of the day, a few years earlier, that they spent in Naples, where he confessed to, as May relates it, "the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen to you, that you had in your bones the foreboding and the conviction of, and that would perhaps overwhelm you." Marcher has never told anyone else about this, and he can't think why he shared it with May, seemingly on a whim; nevertheless, it becomes the basis for a friendship that survives across years of daily visits filled with endless discussions of this idee fixe. When May takes ill, Marcher feels psychologically abandoned, yet only after her death does he realize that the catastrophe he has so long feared has unfolded slowly and in plain view: With May gone, he has missed out on love, passion, and the possibility of a meaningful existence.

Thompson updates the story and gives it an entirely new context. Instead of a genteel, long-running friendship between Londoners -- in the story, May exists, frugally, on a small legacy from a late cousin -- Marcher and May encounter each other exactly three times across half a century -- in 1968, when, visiting the ruins of Pompeii, he makes his fateful admission; in 1988, when he is an art dealer and she, the wife of a customer, living in a stately English country house; and in 2018, when she, now a famous photographer, appears in New York, exhibiting a retrospective of her work, much of which focuses on him. Marcher's defining problem -- his inability to glance beyond the pleasant surface of life -- has been made lurid and melodramatic: He flies into panic attacks at the possibility of sexual intimacy commingled with love. In Stroman's staging, the "beast," a mere metaphor in James' story, is transformed into a monstrous apparition, a giant leering face realized by the set designer/puppet specialist, Michael Curry. The show works overtime showing Marcher cavorting with the half-dozen fetching females who make up the chorus, but watching Tony Yazbeck, as the young Marcher, have a conniption each time May gets too close, you have to wonder if he really is such a ladies' man, if you know what I mean. They do take part in a frantic and distinctly un-Jamesian bout of sex in the England sequence, but still. The modernization of the story undoes the corset of Edwardian manners that inhibits the characters, giving rise to all sorts of questions, chief among them, why doesn't Marcher find a good therapist to deal with what, as presented here, is little more than a textbook-Freudian case? (Interestingly, A. R. Gurney's comedy Later Life also updates the material while remaining far more faithful to James' intentions.)

The vulgarization of the original material wouldn't matter if The Beast in the Jungle had a life of its own, but, without the presence of song to act as a bridge between the dialogue and movement scenes, this is an awkward dance-drama hybrid. And Stroman's dances, which employ a fairly standard musical theatre vocabulary, can't really express the terrors gnawing at Marcher's soul. (Most of the dance sequences end in evocations of the Matisse painting, "The Dance," which features in the plot, a strategy that wears thin.) Some of the pairings with Yazbeck and Irina Dvorovenko as May (here reinvented as a Russian, for obvious reasons) have a pleasing romantic lilt, especially, given Kander's score, a beguiling exploration of waltz time in all its splendors. But no matter how enthusiastically Yazbeck cringes in front of bestial apparitions or contorts himself in displays of torment, it's hard to accept Marcher as anything but a grade A neurotic. And the spell of the dances is frequently broken by appearances from Peter Friedman, as the older Marcher, who stalks about, spelling out every nuance with his loquacious narration. Most of the time, The Beast in the Jungle plays like a musical for which somebody forgot to hire a lyricist.

Yazbeck remains one of the most gifted musical theatre leading men around and his dancing is impeccable, as is that of Dvorovenko, but neither is capable of convincing us that their characters share a profound and enduring love despite having met exactly three times across five decades. If anything, Friedman makes the older Marcher more unpleasant than necessary. The principal cast is rounded out by Teagle F. Bougere, who neatly pockets his scenes as May's seemingly tolerant husband; he also has a nice cameo near the end as another spouse, whose act of mourning triggers Marcher's terrible self-realization.

Curry's set design is dominated by the puppets he creates so masterfully, even if they are too-literal manifestations of Marcher's imaginary beast. Ben Stanton creates one stunning lighting look after another, often carving out the principals with side light backed by upstage washes using a daringly saturated palette. Curry's costumes are solid, and they go a long way toward plausibly aging Dvorovenko. Peter Hylenski's sound design combines a natural-sounding reinforcement with such effects as surf, applause, and a train engine. But, time and again, The Beast in the Jungle is undone by its leaden book, especially the framing device, in which the elder Marcher recounts his story to his commitment-averse nephew (Yazbeck again). On the bright side, it's fascinating to see Kander (and company) playing with the form; it seems clear that this elder statesman of musical theatre isn't done yet -- not by a long shot. -- David Barbour