Theatre in Review: February House (Public Theater)If you're going to populate your musical with the likes of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, and Gypsy Rose Lee -- and that's just for openers -- audiences have every right to expect some fireworks. If February House offers less fizz and more fizzle, it is largely because the people who created it can't quite settle on a tone or point of view. Most of the time, the new musical at the Public's Newman Theater reduces these neurotic, selfish, creative, and altogether devilishly complex personalities to a series of drab cartoon sketches. The outlines are there, but somebody forgot to fill in the colors. The title refers to 7 Middagh Street, the forbidding and dilapidated Brooklyn town house that, for a while in the early '40s, was home to the trio listed above, as well as Benjamin Britten; Peter Pears; Jane and Paul Bowles; and Erika, Klaus, and Golo Mann (children of Thomas). Their host was George Davis, fiction editor at Harper's Bazaar and Mademoiselle, who, one imagines, had his hands full dealing with so many highly strung tenants. It was Anais Nin, a frequent visitor, who named it "February House," because several residents celebrated their birthdays in that month. But for those living on Middagh Street, it was no Age of Aquarius --liquor, parties, and love affairs abounded, but so did squabbles, ideological divisions, and squalor, and this experiment in communal living imploded in short order. Seth Bockley's libretto necessarily pares down the guest list to Davis, Auden (and his then lover, Chester Kallman), Britten and Pears, McCullers, and Lee. We get only one Mann, in the person of Erika, who makes eyes at McCullers and scolds Auden for not fully supporting the war effort. The only outsider is Reeves McCullers, who drops by from time to time to remind his estranged wife that she is living in "some fairy world, playing house with a bunch of highbrow queers." No oasis of stability, he nevertheless has a point; February House tends to present its characters as so many spoiled children, complaining about the phone bill while proving thoroughly unable to do anything about it. The libretto strikes a notably brittle tone from the get-go. The household is described as "like Brook Farm -- but without the vegetarians." Seeing the house for the first time, Auden says, "It looks somewhat like the Victorian age vomited into a foundation." Seeing Pears and Britten, in their very British ensembles, for the first time, McCullers says, "Hello -- are you from the Church of Latter-Day Saints?" A little bit of this archness goes a long way -- but, most of the time, it is all February House has to offer. The action, such as it is, follows everyone in his/her struggle to create, efforts that are frequently interrupted by spats that erupt like summer squalls. McCullers labors over what will become The Ballad of the Sad Café while downing epic amounts of booze and falling into an affair with Mann, who works at publishing a magazine -- ironically, given the feckless company she keeps, called Decision -- designed to awaken Americans to the dangers of Nazi Germany. Auden and Britten collaborate, unhappily, on the opera Paul Bunyan, which, starring Pears, is accorded a disastrous critical reception. Auden, the most fully realized character in the piece, is paralyzed by the specter of world war and distressed to see his "marriage" to Kallman -- a bright, but unformed, personality half Auden's age -- slipping away. Fulfilling the role of housemother, cheerleader, and camp counselor is Davis, who, when he isn't covering the waterfront looking for rough trade or embezzling the house's funds to purchase antiques, keeps rhapsodizing over the family he has created. When Lee finally shows up, just before intermission -- she needs a place to grind out her magnum opus, The G-String Murders -- she gets on everyone else's nerves, especially when it takes her a mere seven weeks to produce a novel that immediately lands on the best-seller list. But they can't get rid of her, largely because she alone has any money. It is impossibly rich material. The characters are artists, living on the cutting edge of their disciplines; refugees from the greatest calamity of the 20th century armed with a variety of political viewpoints; homosexuals pioneering the concept of marriage equality seven decades before the president of the United States would endorse it. Given their complicated personalities and the events surrounding them, February House should be the very stuff of drama, populated by a cast of characters who know their way around a zinger. If nothing else, it could be a powerful parable of the folly that brings down most utopian communities, namely the attempt to thrive while living outside of history. Instead, Auden, Lee, McCullers, et al are so many paper dolls, existing merely to strike poses and be moved around the stage in various tableaux. These disappointments are not relieved by Gabriel Kahane's songs; he's a new and somewhat distinctive writer, and, regarding his abilities as a theatrical storyteller, the jury remains deadlocked. Certainly, he has opted not to write for his characters, imposing on them a single style than risks becoming monotonous. He favors long, run-on lines that, on approaching melodies, tend to skirt them rather nervously, and his lyrics, while often clever, are full of word play that isn't really all that playful and thus becomes wearisome. (The opening number, "Light Upon the Hill," strikes a slightly grandiose note that the libretto never really follows up on: "In a house one impossible season/We trampled on reason and love lost to lust/We were drunk while across gaping oceans/The motions of armies we never discussed.") At the same time, there's an attractively melancholy ballad, "Goodnight to the Boardinghouse," and another number, "Georgia," in which McCullers lays out with exactitude why this menagerie is a little too much even for her. I thought I disliked "Awkward Angel," Auden's declaration of futile love for Kallman, but, then again, I can recall most of it a week later. (Some numbers, which set Auden's lyrics to music, are worth a second listen.) But there are some truly unfortunate contributions as well. "A Certain Itch," in which Britten and Pears complain for what seems like several years about the house's infestation with bedbugs, completes the task, begun by the libretto, of reducing these two great artists to comic Brits out of a Gilbert and Sullivan chorus line. Lee's big number, "A Little Brain," which wants to be a series of sophisticated double entendres in the Cole Porter manner, is notable for not offering one authentic laugh. ("Is your dissertation thick?/Does its substance really stick?/I measure men by their pencils/And not by their muscles.") It frankly made me wish someone had taken the decision to interpolate Rodgers and Hart's "Zip" into the score. Then again, just as February House never really takes its occupants all that seriously, it also fails to find much comic contrast in the sparks struck when egos collide. Clearly, we're meant to be fascinated by these hothouse creatures, but, too much of the time, they come off as tiresome and self-involved. It all strains the efforts of an appealing cast, especially Stanley Bahorek's frigidly proper Britten; Ken Barnett's slightly warmer, faintly mischievous Pears; and A. J. Shively's attractive and well-sung Kallman. The best work comes from Erik Lochtefeld, whose Auden is wearily aware of his own contradictions. The weakest contribution comes from Kacie Sheik as Lee, but, given the flatness of her material, don't blame her. Everyone else is perfectly solid, as are Riccardo Hernandez's attractively spare setting (especially the upstage brick wall that reveals a view of the Brooklyn Bridge), Mark Barton's lighting, Jess Goldstein's costumes, and Leon Rothenberg's remarkably subtle sound design. The penultimate number in February House is a reprise of "Light Upon the Hill," which eulogizes the characters as "an empire of artists," "a house full of genius," and "a fabulous freak show." It's too bad that, at the eleventh hour, we have to be reminded of these notions, because nothing we've seen in the previous two-and-a-half hours has served to support them.--David Barbour 
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