In a Trip of Love program note, creator-director-choreographer James Walski asserts that his expensive-looking entry is intended as a return to the long-forgotten Broadway revue. Though that same program specifies "TIME: Now; PLACE: Here," the time is much more directly the 1960's and the place is the decade's television variety hours. If you imagine Hullabaloo and its boob-tube cousins, you've got exactly the right images in mind.
Cribbing from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Walski sees a young blonde, here identified as Caroline (Kelly Felthous), who's fallen through a rabbit hole -- Crystal (Tara Palsha), Caroline and ensemble chant Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" -- to begin an adventure that leads to her meeting and marrying Adam (Austin Miller) before he goes off to the Vietnam War and eventually returns home for a happy ending.
The flimsy storyline is, however, the fabricated excuse for extravagant production numbers with Peter Max-like settings courtesy of Walski and Robin Wagner and costumes -- topped by Josh Marquette's elaborate period wigs -- by Gregg Barnes, who's in a classically vulgar mood. There are masses of those sparkling outfits.
The many routines are built on no less than 28 songs from the '60s charts, none of them Beatles or Rolling Stones tunes, by the way. (Who knows what the revue's large continent of Japanese producers is paying ASCAP and BMI in the way of royalties. It can't be peanuts.)
Hits like "In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida," the Oscar-winning "Moon River," ""You Don't Own Me" and 25 more are sung vociferously by featured players Felthous, Miller, Palsha, David Elder, Dionne Figgins, Joey Calveri and Laurie Wells. Wells is the one entrusted with the biggest emotional power ballads. She uniformly renders them with big, if not deep, feeling. She opens with "The Windmills of Your Mind," the Michel Legrand-Marilyn Bergman-Alan Bergman whopper of an Oscar-winning tune, and she also delivers "Both Sides Now" and plenty of "If You Go Away."
For "Wipe Out" Caroline and the 12 tireless dancers go surf-boarding. That's until they all come out of the stylized waves, and Caroline gets to croon "Where the Boys Are." Adam is introduced rendering "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" in a public garden, where no one joining him in song seems to notice they're reprising an anti-war threnody.
From start to finish, the Trip of Love cast members smile from ear to ear as if their paychecks depend on it. The non-stop grinning is more than might eventually be said of audiences who either remember the TV shows the enterprise is echoing or who wouldn't be interested in exposure to them now.
****
If mankind, and that includes womankind, is unable to create enduring peace, is it possible a machine could do it? That's the musical question bookwriter-lyricist-composer (with The Lisps) César Alvarez has been refining for several years in something he calls Futurity. Now, courtesy of Soho Rep. and Ars Nova, he brings the latest manifestation to the Connelly, and, given the showing director Sarah Benson accords the tuner, it eminently deserves further tinkering.
Alvarez's way into the issue is by imagining himself, while working guitar, as off-to-battle Civil War soldier Julian Monro, who's begun an epistolary conversation with Lord Byron's mathematician daughter Ada Lovelace (Sammy Tunis).
Lovelace has an idea to create what would be an early computer. (Set designers Emily Orling and Matt Saunders erect something resembling a circuit board as an upstage wall shielding the band.) And as the Monro-Lovelace missives fly, the two dreamers wonder about the potential for achieving peace while Union soldiers (they're the combatants whom the audience sees) and Confederate soldiers are sacrificing their lives wholesale.
To illustrate the plan, Benson guides a multi-racial cast of 13 through two acts. (Hamilton has firmed up the effectiveness of such a mix, and John Doyle has long since established the effectiveness of an instrument-playing troupe.)
As of now, however, the second act, which doesn't pull its denouement punches, is too much a repetition of the first. It's the Orling-Saunders set that undergoes the biggest change -- from the by-now-dismantled circuit-board look to a more traditional whirling-gears apparatus that resembles Rube Goldberg's fiddling around crossed with something from Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times.
Keep in mind that the premise seems to be as I've described it, although not every word of Alvarez's score is clearly enunciated, and thereby some nuances may have been overlooked. Throughout, there's a whole lotta garbling goin' on.
Not every song -- many dealing with things like "particles of the brain" and "the technology of morality" -- is up to Alvarez's best examples. He and The Lisps (percussionist Eric Farber chief among them) come up with some catchy refrains, not the least a folksy number about going to the Cumberland Gap. There's also a standout in which Alvarez talks in peppy terms about Socrates, Pythagoras and Abraham Lincoln.
But too many of the ditties aren't so much adorned with lyrics as they are made of clunky prose chunks Alvarez has placed on shapeless melodies. This kind of supposed song form can be traced to the wonderful "Frank Mills" in Hair, but it shouldn't be overused.
There's another creative-team member deserving of attention -- choreographer David Neumann. He's got musician-singer-actors Alvarez, Tunis, Farber, Fred Epstein, Andrew R. Butler, Eamon Goodman, Kristine Haruna Lee, Mia Pixley, Kamala Sankaram, Jessie Shelton, Darius Smith, Storm Thomas and the always attention-getting Karen Kandel close-marching like a show-off marine drill squad.