Theatre in Review: A Sign of the Times (York Theatre Company at New World Stages)

	Photo: Jeremy Daniel

Ah, nostalgia: A Sign of the Times is set in the 1960s, a time when musicals were expected to have original books and scores. What days they were: Songs crafted to suit the characters, lyrics that advanced the plot. I get misty-eyed just thinking about it. We live in the 2020s, however, the era of jukebox musicals, which are created in reverse, featuring stories twisted around bundles of existing pop hits. It's a form of creative origami that usually produces ungainly results. Like, for example, A Sign of the Times.

Lindsay Hope Pearlman's book, based on a story by Richard J. Robin (one of the producers), is a tale of female aspirants in the big bad city, circa 1965. Cindy, a winsome thing from Centerville, Ohio, flees the prospect of marriage and motherhood, storming Manhattan equipped only with her camera and a dream of becoming the next Ruth Orkin. She moves in with Tanya, a would-be pop star stuck in the commercial-jingle ghetto. Cindy gets a job in an advertising agency that functions like a singles bar, with the exclusively male executive staff preying on the ladies in the secretarial pool who treat sexual harassment as part of their job descriptions. Openly ogling Cindy is Brian, the agency's head, a Don Draper type so oleaginous he practically leaves a trail of margarine in his wake. The largely apolitical Tanya takes up with Cody, an organizer from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, whose willingness to put himself in harm's way for the cause leaves her tense and wary of commitment. (One tear-gas-stained rally is quite enough for her, thank you very much.)

Such as it is, A Sign of the Times belongs to the ladies, thanks to a trio of bright talents. As Cindy, the Broadway veteran Chilina Kennedy has a disarming, Marty-Tyler-Moore smile; an amusingly flustered manner when dealing with the office wolfpack; and a pristine voice with a concealed growl that is ever ready to pounce. Crystal Lucas-Perry, as Tanya, has a tart way with a line, a ready-to-party enthusiasm, and a vocal belt that mows down everything in its path, especially in a show-stopping version of "Rescue Me." Providing solid support is choreographer JoAnn M. Hunter, who puts the chorus through a series of amusing Hullabaloo moves, deploys four mini-skirted Valkyries to comment on sexism in the workplace (to "These Boots are Made for Walkin'"), and executes a charming tableau of lovers on a rainy street.

But whenever A Sign of the Times tries to articulate a story, it lurches to a halt. Cindy's problems on the job play like a retread of Promises, Promises, only with weaker gags and songs that don't fit their situations. The show tries to work up a triangle between her, Brian, and Matt, her hometown beau who ends up in Vietnam, but a less appealing pair of suitors is hard to imagine. The Tanya-Cody plot is a blatantly manufactured pairing of opposites, her disdain of politics explained in a weak flashback set to the Janis Ian hit "Society's Child." The score draws heavily on the Petula Clark catalog, filling it out with selections from here, there, and everywhere, some of which are groaningly deployed. Before he ships out, Matt calls Cindy from the town of Clarksville, causing the audience to giggle in anticipation of a certain Monkees hit. A reunion between Cody and Tanya, staged on a street during a downpour, is set to "Don't Sleep in the Subway," chosen to take advantage of the lyric "Don't sleep in the pouring rain." Of course, it's unclear why either one of them is singing about the subway, but there you are.

The eclectic song choices are tied to a book that is mostly about romantic mix-ups plus a dose of feminist awakening while namechecking Vietnam, civil rights, gay liberation, and other issues of the era. (There are weak jokes about, among others, Betty Friedan, Quincy Jones, and Cosmopolitan.) But you can get whiplash from a score that veers from "The Shoop Shoop Song" to "Eve of Destruction" in a matter of minutes. And, now and forever, the trouble with a show like this is that it has no fidelity to anything but the next song; everything else must be molded to fit the tune stack. Unlike real musicals, the songs do little or nothing to fill out the characters or move the story along. One always ends up with a bunch of stick figures singing a random selection of greatest hits.

Gabriel Barre's direction keeps things in constant motion, possibly on the no-doubt sound theory that if the action never pauses, the audience won't have time to ask awkward questions. Among the male contingent, Ryan Silverman (Brian) looks creepy enough to play Dracula, although he delivers a charming rendition of "Call Me," and Justin Matthew Sargent does his best as Matt, the Ohio boyfriend and war vet, who has A Secret. Akron Lanier Watson is likable as Cody, although his character seems to come from some other, rather more realistic, show.

The wildly uneven production design begins charmingly, with the upstage wall of Evan Adamson's set making an idea canvas for Brad Peterson's inventive projections. In one delightful touch, Cindy's arrival in New York, via bus, features a series of passing landscapes replaced by the city's transit map, which is supplanted by an aerial view of Manhattan; it's a first-timer's ecstatic view of her long-dreamed-about destination. The show curtain amusingly makes use of period TV commercials for Dial Soap, Corn Flakes, Comet, and Clairol, the latter asking the eternal question, "Does she or doesn't she?" Johanna Pan's costumes, aided by J. Jared Janas' wigs, capture the styles of the period, with their narrowly tailored suits and ascending hemlines. Ken Billington's lighting is splashy and colorful. Shannon Slaton's sound design confidently keeps the voices on top of Joseph Church's zippy arrangements. But there are oddities as well, including some cluttered interiors that don't mesh well with the projections, unflattering costumes for the leading ladies, and a party sequence hosted by an Andy Warhol figure (known as "Randy Forthwall") that looks just plain messy.

I belong to the target audience of A Sign of the Times, the entire score being plucked from my remote youth. And, like just about anyone else of my generation, it's impossible to not start bopping in my seat when somebody onstage launches into "Downtown" or "I Know a Place." But such treats can be enjoyed at home without being distracted by a frail plot and characters who don't amount to anything. And yet these shows persist: Jukebox musicals (which are distinct from bio-musicals) can occasionally be made to work, but for every Mamma Mia! there are offerings like Good Vibrations, Escape from Margaritaville, and Once Upon a One More Time, all of which vanished soon after opening. Is it really harder for producers to throw their support behind new works? Plenty of writers and composers could use the help. --David Barbour