REVIEWS ...
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Arts & Entertainment
Friday, January 9, 2009
Highbrow Fun in the Sunshine State
By TERRY TEACHOUT Mr. Teachout, the Journal's drama critic, blogs about theater and the other arts at www.terryteachout.com.
Mixed feelings come in more than one flavor. I had my doubts about the Off-Broadway production of "Adding Machine," the Jason Loewith-Joshua Schmidt musical adaptation of Elmer Rice's 1923 play about a murderous bookkeeper, but that didn't stop me from being impressed by its glittering craft and arrogant self-assurance. Since then I've been eagerly awaiting a second chance to see "Adding Machine," and now GableStage has provided it. This is the show's first regional-theater production since its Chicago premiere, and while I still have a few lingering doubts about it, I can now testify to its staying power: It's even more thought-provoking the second time around.
Mr. Zero (Oscar Cheda), the downtrodden antihero of "Adding Machine," is a henpecked Babbitt who is replaced by a machine, kills his boss, goes directly to heaven and discovers that bliss isn't all it's cracked up to be. His journey, an expressionistic portrayal of Life Under Capitalism, is enacted with the coarseness and verve of high-quality poster art and accompanied by a bristlingly clever score whose idiom morphs from hard-edged minimalism to pastiche pop balladry and back again. Musically speaking, "Adding Machine" feels more like an opera than a musical -- it reminds me in places of "The Cradle Will Rock," Marc Blitzstein's 1937 pop opera about a union organizer -- but the book is stage-savvy enough to mollify audiences that might otherwise find Mr. Schmidt's music over-angular.
GableStage's production, staged by Joseph Adler, the company's artistic director, is highly impressive but noticeably different in tone from the Chicago-to-Off-Broadway transfer of "Adding Machine." The earlier version, directed by David Cromer, was deliberately, at times off-puttingly, chilly -- emphasizing the show's brilliance at the occasional expense of its humanity. Mr. Adler and his fine cast, by contrast, have softened the edges of "Adding Machine," treating the characters less as symbols than as flesh-and-blood creatures who are cartoonish but still recognizably human. I admit to having found the results quite a bit more engaging, if perhaps less true to what Messrs. Loewith and Schmidt had in mind.
Improbable as it may sound, GableStage is located in the Biltmore Hotel, a palatial resort for tourists whose tastes would appear to run more to swimming and golf than the sort of serious theater that Mr. Adler and his colleagues have on tap. Yet the company shows every sign of flourishing, and rightly so: "Adding Machine" is a tough nut to crack, but this production makes the strongest possible case for the most interesting new musical to come along since "The Light in the Piazza."
