Theatre in Review: Ghost (Lunt-Fontanne Theatre)

A sign outside the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre quotes a reviewer from The Faster Times, saying, "Ghost is the future of theatre!" If that's true, dystopia is imminent.

Here at Lighting&Sound America, we are usually the official greeters for all things technological, so let me say right now that the production design -- Rob Howell's scenery and Jon Driscoll's video and projections -- are, on their own terms, extremely impressive. The basic set design features three video walls that create astonishingly vivid landscapes of photorealistic imagery -- New York streets, aerial views of Manhattan at night -- as well as more abstract content, including cascades of numbers from the Dow Jones Index; kicky, Caribbean-colored animations of cocktails; and large-scale renditions of ten-million-dollar bills. A scene set on the subway -- with an interior subway-seating unit placed behind the upstage video wall -- provides a series of rapid-fire views of the subway car from different angles. At other times, a scrim flies in downstage, allowing for additional layers of front-projected imagery to be added to the mix.

If only you could find the people on stage. It's not only that the power of the images -- stretching the width of the stage and wrapping around the sides -- reduces the chorus to a bunch of silhouettes in virtually every dance number, which is regrettable. It's that, next to the overwhelming pictures on stage, and forced to rely on a book and score of rare mediocrity, the actors haven't a chance. They're reduced to puppets, moving on cue, hitting their marks, and singing their songs, to no effect whatsoever. They're not even in a battle with the technology surrounding them; they've essentially been devoured by ones and zeros.

Bruce Joel Rubin's book (he also contributed some lyrics) pretty much recaps the events of his screenplay for the hit film, seemingly without stopping for a second to consider that writing for the theatre might require a different approach. This helps to explain the notably banal dialogue; on the screen, dialogue is a small part of the overall picture, as each frame is filled with information -- including the actors' expressions and details of the production design -- that provide additional clues to the characters; there's no need for heightened language. Here, given little of interest to say and nothing in the way of individual character details, the lead characters, Sam and Molly, are so colorless they may as well be in black and white. Actually, at times, they are -- any time things get romantic, that scrim comes in and we see a film montage of lovemaking, all close-ups of bare shoulders and lips seen in a prelude to a kiss.

It appears that all involved have assumed that everyone in the audience will have seen the film and thus require only a reminder of its outline to become involved. This approach all but stifles any efforts by Richard Fleeshman and Caissie Levy, who play Sam and Molly, to establish a bond with the audience. Fleeshman is blessed with good looks, a strong presence, and a powerful voice; as she demonstrated in the recent revival of Hair, Levy is a fine singer with plenty of idiosyncratic charm, although I regret that she has been encouraged to scream her solos in the manner of an American Idol contestant. In any case, both performers are reduced to ciphers. The same goes for Bryce Pinkham, as Carl, Sam's alleged best friend, a sleazebag with debts to the mob, who, covering up his money-laundering activities, inadvertently gets Sam killed.

The scenes in which Sam struggles to adapt to his new life as a ghost are filled with impressive visual effects by Paul Kieve, including the frankly astonishing moment when Sam passes through a door. (There are some brilliant flying effects, too, when an aggrieved ghost Sam wreaks havoc on the subway, and when a couple of characters are killed off, their ectoplasmic selves being dispatched into a vortex.) But the moment of Sam's death also marks the point that Ghost, until now merely a dull and overdesigned show, really starts to jump the rails. For no particular reason, except that it apparently represents the comfort zone of the songwriters, Dave Stewart and Glen Ballard, Sam is greeted in the afterlife by the "hospital ghost," an elderly black man, who sings a blues-inspired number, "You Gotta Let Go," accompanied by a chorus of shades from different eras. (Among the other spirits, there's a flapper and one dressed rather like Mary Todd Lincoln.) The number is no better or worse than any other in a score that suffers painfully in comparison to "Unchained Melody," used so indelibly in the film and retained here, but it is an early warning sign of the trouble the creative team has at blending the film's disparate strands of romance, comedy, and melodrama into a coherent entertainment.

The comedy is almost totally the province of Da'Vine Joy Randolph as Oda Mae Brown, the phony psychic who can communicate with Sam, and is thus deputized to save Molly from Carl. When Randolph is on stage, the show lurches from gothic romance to lowdown urban farce; dressed in some of the most vulgar getups you've ever seen, the performer uses every sassy, black-gal-pal gesture invented -- strutting, sassing, belting each line to the back row of the balcony, never mind her songs -- in an effort to get laughs. It's a borderline offensive performance; history will not be kind to this sort of stock comic characterization. (Her séances are backed up by a pair of girl gospel singers; she wears outrageous wigs and wildly tasteless outfits, including an enormous white fox fur and wraparound sunglasses; when, in the course of committing bank fraud, with her nerves allegedly on edge, she always remembers to ask the banker if she can keep the pen.) In a sign of how easily Ghost will sell its soul for a big hand, at the exact moment that Molly is in her greatest peril, and we should be gripped with suspense, the action stops dead for Oda Mae to deliver "I'm Outta Here," both the weakest and loudest eleven o'clock number I have sat through in over three decades of regular theatregoing.

Hugh Vanstone's lighting is surprisingly good, given the circumstances under which he is working; he is probably helped by the gallons of fog that are pumped on stage. The sound design, by Bobby Aitken, is more problematic. For whatever reason -- the theatre's challenging acoustics, directorial or authorial fiat, or the need to cover up noisy moving lights and/or projection technology -- the audio levels are cranked up very, very high, with muddy, indistinct results. (The voices are often lost under Christopher Nightingale's orchestrations.)

We get a few bad musicals each season, many of them brazen attempts at repeating the success of a hit film, and most of them are easily forgotten. But Ghost is something different -- a warning sign of what Broadway shows might become if new technologies are deployed recklessly, without any consideration for the theatre's unique ability to create an electric connection between the people on stage and those in the audience. The show's creative team is a fine one. Matthew Warchus is one of the best directors of contemporary plays around -- especially comedies -- and all his designers have done excellent work many times before. Watching Ghost, however, I couldn't help recalling an interview I did with the projection designer Wendall K. Harrington a few months ago, for a story in American Theatre magazine. "Video has a kind of perfection that is dangerous," she said. "It makes the people on stage smaller and less interesting. The question needs to be asked: Are we competing with the people on stage? When we negate that, we're killing our future." Consider yourselves warned.--David Barbour