BWW Reviews: Art Imitates Life as an Idea Doesn't Quite Come to Fruition in FEBRUARY HOUSE

Stephanie Hayes, Kristen Sieh and Julian Fleisher. Photo: T. Charles Erickson

FEBRUARY HOUSE
Long Wharf Theatre
www.longwharf.org

The idea is a good one -- both in real life, where editor George Davis dreams of running a boarding house for artists in Brooklyn, and and in the theater, where book writer Seth Bockley brings the residents' stories to the stage, but a lack of practical planning in both cases fails to bring the ideas to full fruition.

While the real commune didn't work at 7 Middagh St. because of a lack of funds and personal complications among the boarders, FEBRUARY HOUSE, playing its world premiere at Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven prior to an Off-Broadway run at the coproducing Public Theater in New York, makes the mistake of trying to be a musical (Gabriel Kahane writes the score and lyrics as well as providing orchestrations).

The characters are interesting enough. Novelist Carson McCullers (Kristen Sieh) is working on her second book, edited by best friend Davis, following the success of "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter." Composer Benjamin Britten (Stanley Bahorek) and his partner Peter Pears (Ken Barnett) collaborate on an opera about Paul Bunyon. Meanwhile, poet Wystan Hugh Auden (Erik Lochtefeld) and his wife of convenience, actress/writer Erika Mann (Stepahnie Hayes), who only married Auden to obtain British citizenship to flee the Nazi regime, also take rooms.

It soon becomes clear that the crumbling VictorIan Brownstone (represented in skimpy fashion by set designer Riccardo Hernandez by some furniture pieces and a wood molding suspended above the action) serves as much as a safe haven for alternative lifestyle choices in the 1940 USA as it does as a creative retreat. Britten and Pears no longer have to pretend to be brothers living together. Auden lives openly with much younger struggling poet Chester Kallam (A.J. Shively), whom he calls husband, and Mann and McCullers begin a sexual relationship, much to the despair of McCullers' husband, Reeves (Ken Clark), who visits the house often and tries to convince his wife that she isn't herself and needs to return with him to their home in Georgia.

The warmth of utopia wears off, however, and February House's winter setting is felt as creativity and relationships cool -- the temperature drops literally, when the heating bill isn't paid. In fact, funds to pay for lots of things like the rent, the phone, tuning the piano, bringing out an exterminator to rid the place of bed bugs and most importantly, to purchase a never-ending supply of booze, are dwindling and the "family" turns to father figure Davis to come up with a solution.

He calls on old friend Gypsy Rose Lee (Kacie Sheik) to lend her striptease talents to some soiree fundraisers. She also pays some bills and takes a room while Davis edits her first novel, "The G-String Murders."

While the story (also told in "February House," a 2005 book by Sherill Tippins on which this musical is based) is interesting, particularly since it doesn't focus on the point of view of just one character, but gives everyone a voice, the unimaginative score is not. Only a couple of songs have a different feel to them. Most sound like a failed attempt to put lines that should be spoken to a few cacophonous notes of music. The battle to turn the work into a musical weakens the characters' ability to develop. Director Davis McCallum is forced to try to make the two competing elements work, with help from choreographer Danny Medford, but the 24 musical numbers in the two-and-a-half-hour show quickly have us asking, "Another song? Seriously?"

Lauren, a former newspaper editor, is the editor of The Connecticut Arts Connection (http://ctarts.blogspot.com) and Reflections in the Light (http://reflectionsinthelight.blogspot.com) where she reviews Broadway, Off-Broadway and Connecticut theater. She also is a freelance writer and consults and produces for the theater. She is a member of The Drama Desk, The Outer Critics Circle, The American Theater Critics Association, the CT Critics Circle, The League of Professional Theatre Women and the National Book Critics Circle. She and her husband live in Granby, CT. Visit her writing site at http://laurenyarger.wordpress.com.

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