Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice review – swinging 60s musical avoids revolution
Ten thousand years ago – maybe 20,000 – humans swung toward monogamy. People have been trying to swing back ever since. Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, a 1969 movie that gazes, with a wink and the occasional leer, at the sexual revolution, has been reconceived, tentatively, as a musical. Love – and the artistic choices – are not exactly free.
Related: Sing Street review – hit film heads to the stage with something missing
We first meet Bob (Joél Pérez) and Carol (Jennifer Damiano), a couple in their 30s with a young son, in their Jaguar convertible, cruising toward a Big Sur institute that sounds a lot like Esalen. On the radio, a singer – played here by the folk goddess Suzanne Vega, sublime and criminally underused – invites them to tune into the consciousness and turn on the righteousness. After some tai chi, a massage and a 24-hour encounter therapy session, they do. Soon Bob is bedding a grad student and Carol is playing mixed doubles with her club’s tennis instructor, off court. This unzipping upsets their more straight-laced friends, Ted (Michael Zegen of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel) and Alice (Ana Nogueira). “I’m scared of joining in,” they sing, “and terrified of missing out.”
If the movie is gently satiric and cheerful in its occasional sleaze, the musical traffics in a blithe and numbing ambivalence, as though the theater’s air has been infused with diazepam. The director, Scott Elliott, and the book writer, Jonathan Marc Sherman, can’t decide whether or not they want to mock these people or sympathize with them. The music floats above the story rather than fully integrating into it and the sardonic songs – by Duncan Sheik, with a lyrical assist from Amanda Green – are more fully realized, like an ode to marijuana, whose lyrics are mellow rather than tortured. “I had something to say,” a baked Ted croons. “But now I’ve forgotten / My head’s full of clouds / My mouths’s full of cotton.”
Though the show doesn’t fully develop its characters, it does allow them the occasional heartfelt ballad, too, which rarely reveal or deepen character and are sappy in ways that don’t seem entirely intentional, like Carol’s Journey to Us: “There was something we needed to see / I thought it was inside of me / But it was oh so much better because / It was inside of us.” Smutty? Sincere? You decide.
That ambivalence (or is it just a kind of apathy of vision?) extends to everything from the acting, which is often, but not always, exaggerated, to the wardrobe (Jeff Mahshie did the costumes), which is ridiculous and covetable all at the same time, to the set (designed by Derek McLane), with its brown sectional and copy of I’m OK, You’re OK. No makeup designer is credited, but those fake eyelashes didn’t glue themselves on. There’s some light audience participation, which is sweet but inconsequential, and some lithe musical staging, by Kelly Devine, that rarely allows for dance. Vega, groovy and seemingly ageless, is a marvel and a gift, though Elliott doesn’t seem to have fully explored the roles a bandleader might play.
The setting remains 1969 and the music mostly restricts itself to that era, too. But in making the show a period piece and in failing to fully enflesh its characters, who change their clothes more often than their affect, the show undercuts what it means to explore. Many of us still don’t know how to negotiate love and sex and marriage or how to balance the needs of ourselves with the needs of others. Which is to say that these themes deserve more than some far-out Lucite heels and a few bedroom jokes. (To echo a popular meme: sex is great, but have you ever seen a beautifully structured book musical?) For a show about human potential, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice hasn’t reached its own.
