Theatre in Review: Piece of My Heart: The Bert Berns Story (Pershing Square Signature Center)

	Zak Resnick. Photo: Jenny Anderson.

If you've caught Jersey Boys, Motown, Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, and maybe even Baby It's You (for the ten minutes it was around), and you're still hankering for more, I wash my hands of you. Sorry, just kidding; I meant to say, you could check out Piece of My Heart. Then again, be warned: This new Off Broadway show is Exhibit A in the argument that a certain kind of popular musical is now showing signs of morbidity.

Piece of My Heart is the latest in a flood of shows relying on pop catalogs from decades past, but in fact it tries to bridge two separate genres. Like those mentioned above, it's an inside-show-business biography, following the career of a music industry figure and taking note of his many hits. In this case, the protagonist is Bert Berns, a songwriter and producer who died young, leaving a legacy that includes "Twist and Shout," "Hang on Sloopy," and the title tune. But like Mamma Mia! and its many stepchildren, it also tries to use Berns' songs as old-fashioned book musical numbers, explaining the characters' emotions and motivations. This is known as having the worst of both worlds.

This is because Daniel Goldfarb's ungainly book bogs down in a welter of narrative lines and points of view, often stopping well short of coherence. It begins with Jessie, a no-longer-young singer/songwriter, living in obscurity in Seattle, getting an urgent message from a stranger summoning her to an office at 1650 Broadway in Midtown Manhattan. Jessie is the daughter of Bert Berns and she is stunned to discover that, three decades after his death, his work place remains intact, looking just as it did in his heyday. She meets Wazzel, Berns' mobbed-up best friend, who warns that Ilene, Berns' widow and Jessie's mother, is about to sell off his song catalog. He insists that only Jessie, who is estranged from her mother, can stop the sale.

Already, Piece of My Heart has stopped making sense. No explanation is given for why Ilene, who lives in and manages Berns' songs from Nashville, would maintain this unvisited shrine to her late husband, especially since it occupies some of the priciest real estate imaginable. Nor does the book explain why Jessie is so bitterly opposed to the sale of Berns' songs; apparently, it is her life's mission to supervise her father's legacy, finding for him the recognition that he was denied in his lifetime. But even Ilene, her nemesis, quite rightly points out that in doing so, Jessie is surrendering her own identity as an artist, an issue Piece of My Heart doesn't really want to probe.

Anyway, once Jessie meets Wazzel, the flashbacks begin. Act I is told from his point of view, detailing Berns' rise to music industry prominence; Ilene takes over in Act II, focusing on her troubled marriage to Berns and his early death. The first act quickly establishes Berns' ill health, due to a childhood illness that left him with a weak heart and no guarantee of living past his early twenties. You'd think that this ticking-clock scenario would add some drama to the proceedings, but what follows is an extended period of milling around, focusing on Berns' romance with a black singer (which goes nowhere) and his extended stay in Havana, where, in addition to picking up some Latin motifs, he takes part in gun running for Castro's army. If you were to think such activities might add some color and melodrama to the proceedings, you would be in error. The Cuban episode in particular is all talk and no action.

Berns finally hits the jackpot, just before intermission, with the success of "Twist and Shout." Things pick up a bit in Act II, which focuses on his spiky, combative relationship with Ilene, who puts her career aside when she realizes that he has gotten her pregnant. (Ilene takes no prisoners; in one moment of real amusement, she points out to him that the melody of "Twist and Shout" is largely lifted from "Guantanamera.") The rest of the act covers Berns' establishment of his own successful label, which proves his undoing when his partners, Jerry Wexler and the Ertegun brothers, insist on cutting a bigger piece of the profits for themselves and everyone turns to mobsters for protection.

With its dueling narrators, extended mother-daughter battles, a pugilistic central romance, and plenty of music industry skullduggery, Piece of My Heart is fatally overloaded; everything gets the most superficial possible treatment. And because the score relies on songs written half a century ago with an entirely different purpose in mind, they add little or nothing to the story. The songs in the first act fail to make the case that Berns is an underappreciated genius; the best of them, "Look Away," is used as an all-purpose agony ballad for any character who needs it. And audience members looking for a toe-tapping trip down Memory Lane, beware: The score is not the parade of hits offered by the likes of Piece of My Heart's Broadway counterparts.

Denis Jones' staging does little to bring order to this mass of plot points and pop tunes, and his choreography consists of brief interludes made of the moves once seen on American Bandstand. The cast works hard, with variable results. Zak Resnick has an easy, offhand charm as Berns, but he appears to be in the rudest of health and one never really feels his desperation to cheat death. Leslie Kritzer, unflatteringly costumed throughout, is an effectively steely Jessie, even if her motivations are hopelessly muddled. Joseph Siravo is solid as the older Wazzel, although it's never clear how he knows about Ilene's business plans; Bryan Fenkart is convincing as Wazzel's younger self. De'Adre Aziza is amusingly sassy as Berns' first lover, in a role that is little more than filler. Derrick Baskin is fine as Berns' former best friend, whose recording of "Twist and Shout" gets passed over for that of the Isley Brothers. Linda Hart cracks wise with authority as the older Ilene, but she hams it up shamelessly in her vocals, all but begging the audience for applause in her big number. The best work comes from Teal Wicks, who makes a fully dimensional character out of the tough-talking, but soft-hearted, younger Ilene.

Alexander Dodge's set design places the action in a faded-looking recording studio environment, the walls covered with stained, worn acoustical treatments. With its drab gray-and-white palette, it doesn't mesh well with the heavily saturated colors in Ben Stanton's lighting design. David C. Woolard's costumes have a good period feel, but are occasionally a little cartoonish, especially in the case of the older Ilene's outfits, with their garish mixes of prints. Carl Casella's sound design -- in a theatre that, with its many hard reflective surfaces, was never designed for a heavily reinforced musical -- has its ups and downs. The ballads come through clearly, but some of the bigger numbers turn into aural mush.

Piece of My Heart strongly suggests that the songbook musical genre may finally be running out of steam. (I write this fully aware that Gloria Estefan and her husband are moving ahead with their own show.) Anyway, in its attempt at livening up an already stale genre, the show tries to do far too many things; it ends up doing none of them very well.--David Barbour