Waiter! Where’s my food?
“The Most Beautiful Room in New York,” the new musical by Adam Gopnik and David Shire having its world premiere at the Long Wharf Theatre through May 28, takes place in a New York restaurant. Two of them, actually. One’s a casual yet elegant eatery in Union Square, Manhattan. The other is an anarchist pizzeria in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. The Union Square one, called Table, undergoes an overhaul mid-show when its married owners David and Claire decide to bring in an arrogant celebrity chef named Sergio as a partner.
The scene is set for juicy clashes of taste and style, but this nouveau cuisine small-plate of a musical isn’t very filling.
The show’s New York traffic jam of a set design wheels out those aforementioned eateries, a kitchen, farmers-market booths and a lot of tables. There are songs about how to put together a menu, prepare dishes and drink espresso. There are food metaphors galore, about bitterness and richness and sweetness.
But we see, or get to appreciate, precious little actual food. There’s a tender family moment set around the cooking of breakfast. There’s a song called “Chopping Onions, Folding Napkins,” in which David chops an onion, but (speaking as the veteran of many restaurant kitchens, back in my starving-writer days), he doesn’t even do that very professionally.
David sings that Table is the “Most Beautiful Room in New York.” But there’s no food on the tables to prove it. The people he’s singing to are his family and some old friends.
We’re shown a rack of lamb for no real reason, but when some fresh mozzarella cheese is used to introduce one of the Table family to the proprietor of “Carlo’s Anarchist Pizza,” the characters wax rhapsodic over the cheese but all we see is a white bag.
The old theater axiom “Show, don’t tell” truly applies here. And when the concepts of taste and smell are added to the sensory mix as major themes, the lack of a feast you can really dig into is even more obvious.
Gopnik’s wordy lyrics do much more explaining than should be necessary. The dialogue is even denser.
Composer David Shire and director Gordon Edelstein do what they can, but it’s really Gopnik’s show. There’s not much in the book that the songs or staging can propel into big production numbers. There’s very little opportunity for the cast to sing as an ensemble.
Other quibbles are the sort which you can make about the very first productions of any new musicals — the very factors they can often make the experience so exciting. Some songs are very similar to each other, but you know they’re being tested and that the weaker ones will go away. Some lyrics are forced and overwritten, but you know they’re being tested before an audience the way one needs to refine jokes in a comedy.
Everyone in the 12-person cast has impressive Broadway, off Broadway and/or regional credits — even the youngest performer, Sawyer Niehaus (who plays daughter Kate), was in the original Public Theater production of “Fun Home.”
Constantine Maroulis makes the most of his swaggering, smarmy role of Sergio, the TV food star who’s enlisted to help David and Claire save Table. Unfortunately, he’s not given songs that make him stand out from the more mannered restaurant folk: he’s stuck with the same multisyllabic lyrics and longwinded scansion as everyone else.
Tyler Jones (as Bix) and Krystina Alabado (as Carlo’s daughter Anna) represent a younger, hungrier generation in a show otherwise stocked with middle-aged mopes. The youngsters have the idealism, practicality and desire that their parents no longer seem to be able to conjure up. But Bix and Anna’s romantic hook-up is as predictably plotted as David and Claire’s marital crisis.
The old-school Leftist pizza-maker Carlo, whom Mark Nelson plays with the same dejected yet elated air he brought to “Underneath the Lintel” at Long Wharf Stage II a decade ago, is the show’s sharpest character. He comes closest to make real connections between food, community and politics. He also gets one of the show’s biggest laughs, referencing erstwhile Brooklyn boy Bernie Sanders.
As David and Claire, Matt Bogart (from Broadway’s “Jersey Boys” and Goodspeed’s “Camille Claudel”) and Anastasia Barzee (last seen in Connecticut in “Kiss Me Kate” at Hartford Stage) are an attractive couple, but they lack an early number that shows their love to be as strong as we need to believe it is. When their bond is tested, both romantically and professionally, the bickering and uncertainty isn’t countering anything overwhelmingly positive.
“The Most Beautiful Room in New York” puts stale and overripe ingredients in the same dish. The result isn’t particularly appetizing.
“THE MOST BEAUTIFUL ROOM IN NEW YORK” — book and lyrics by Adam Gopnik, music by David Shire, directed by Gordon Edelstein — is at the Long Wharf Theatre, 222 Sargent Drive, New Haven through May 28. Performances are Wednesday at 7 p.m.; Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m.; Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m.; and Sunday at 2 and 7 p.m.; with Wednesday matinees on May 17 and 24. There is no Saturday matinee on May 6 and no Sunday evening performance on May 28. Tickets are $34.50 to $89.50. 203-787-4282, longwharf.org.
