Feb 23, 2007

'Pippin' could use more edge

By John Angell Grant / Theater Review

After the stage musical "Godspell" made a big splash off-Broadway in 1971, its lyricist/composer Stephen Schwartz rummaged around in his drawer for old material, and pulled out a show he'd written for a student production at Carnegie Mellon University in 1967.

Schwartz reworked that show into "Pippin," which opened on Broadway in 1972 for a five-year run, directed by legendary theater sex king Bob Fosse. Now a local production of "Pippin" is running in Los Altos, presented by Foothill Music Theater.

"Pippin" is a fable about the search for personal fulfillment, told ostensibly through the life of 8th-century French emperor Charlemagne's son Pippin.

Written in a modern American sitcom-ish style, "Pippin" turns out to have little to do with 8th-century France and everything to do with the personal, political and spiritual questions that came out of America's 1960s counterculture turmoil.

In this story, looking for meaning in his life, young Pippin joins his father's army to fight, then becomes disillusioned and rebels. Later he gets depressed and ends up retreating to work a piece of land with a single woman who has a son. There's even a hash pipe.

Director Jay Manley's Los Altos production opens with great promise, as several slinky, scantily clad actors on a darkly lit stage emerge unexpectedly out of a smoking box. These turn out to be the Players of what will prove to be a play within a play.

It's a good cast, with some strong performances. Rudy Guerrero is excellent as the Leading Player, sort of a gypsy master of ceremonies, who steps in from time to time to narrate segments of the show, or tweak its action. His crisp, angular dancing is one of the evening's highlights.

Carrie Madsen is hot as the sexual, scheming wife of Charlemagne, plotting regicide in the "Spread a Little Sunshine" number. Alicia Teeter's strong, nurturing leader Catherine goes on an archetypal female mission in the songs "Kind of Woman" and "I Guess I'll Miss the Man."

As Charlemagne, however, Doug Baird was unable to find the gravitas necessary to sell his character as a warmonger and patriarch. Though the real problem with "Pippin" is that there is not enough meat in the story to carry the show.

Although the idea of a spiritual quest is a fine starting point, collaborator Roger O. Hirson's book doesn't deliver much more than cliches. The extensive anti-war theme of the first half gets old after much repetition.

Additional shopworn story elements of family turbulence are familiar to everyone. Further, there is no solid connection between the political turmoil of the show's first half and the conjugal meanderings of its second half.

"Pippin" is at its best when grounded in the Players' lurid, sexual edginess. When that edginess vanishes, the play's simplistic counterculture themes lose their dramatic anchor and drift.

Not that the themes aren't noble ones, it's just that they aren't expressed in a particularly effective way.

Because the counterculture themes are set forward in such a literal, expositional way, it took director and strip club patron Bob Fosse's ingenious sexed-up staging of the 1972 Broadway production - that in some ways conflicted with the story itself - to give that Tony Award-winning production its edge, its incongruous sense of conflict, and its commercial success.

That 1972 staging concept, in other words, found a way to work around the script's inherent weaknesses. To the extent that the edgy staging gets toned down in this local production, the play's vanilla story soon reveals itself to be rather trite and expositional, with lots of shopworn familiarity and few reversals.

Without the sex and the sleaze, in other words, "Pippin" is dull.

Rating: Two stars

E-mail John Angell Grant at jagplays@dailynewsgroup.com.