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Time - Man of the Year
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1993-04-08
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REVIEWS, Page 66THEATERA Big Epic Writ Small
By WILLIAM A. HENRY III
TITLE: ANNA KARENINA
AUTHOR: Music by Daniel Levine; Book and Lyrics by Peter
Kellogg
WHERE: Broadway
THE BOTTOM LINE: Tolstoy's masterpiece becomes a stage
equivalent to TV's Masterpiece Theater.
Anna Karenina makes the case for the smaller-scale
musical. It is a modestly produced chamber piece, with a minimal
set and an orchestra of seven. What is right with the show all
involves just one or two people, notably the first fine rapture
of the title character's illicit infatuation with Count Vronsky
and the pathetic disillusionment that sends her to her grim
fate. What is wrong could not be fixed by any amount of dressing
up. Anna is an earnest, intermittently moving but never quite
thrilling stage equivalent to PBSs Masterpiece Theater -- lovely
gowns, precise elocution and ballroom dancing, with a stately
pace, wayward comic intrusions and scant urgency.
Composer Daniel Levine, who has never written a musical
before, has yet to develop a distinctive sound: there are
stylistic echoes of everything from Blossom Time to Sondheim,
although the wistfulness is genuine enough in the title
character's Act I showstopper, I'm Lost. Levine's writing
partner, Peter Kellogg, also a beginner, deftly focuses the
story on Anna's forced choice between romantic love for Vronsky
and maternal love for her child by her husband Karenin. But
Kellogg nearly wrecks the enterprise with lyrics so blandly
generic that they convey hardly any specifics of character --
especially frustrating when the source, Tolstoy's novel,
provides some of the most vivid characters in world literature.
Director Theodore Mann and choreographer Patricia Birch,
who staged the musical sequences, make remarkably rich use of
a nearly bare stage. Ann Crumb, who starred in Aspects of Love
in London and on Broadway, makes modest Anna's eruption into
passion completely believable and is deeply affecting in her
final derangement. Surrounding her are exceptional men: Gregg
Edelman as the hapless gentleman farmer Levin, Scott Wentworth
as a reckless but wholly admirable version of Vronsky and, most
striking, John Cunningham, who overcomes caricatured writing of
Anna's estranged husband to reveal a man poignantly wrongheaded
and, in his way, as doomed as his desperate spouse.