Saturday Night
By Albert Williams
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Happily, Saturday Night has much more going for it. Slickly yet appealingly performed by a youthful cast under Gary Griffin’s pitch-perfect direction, it’s a fresh, buoyant work in which Sondheim’s trademark wit is reined in by boyish innocence–some of it genuine, some manufactured to fit the immature characters. Ever analytical, Sondheim has on occasion been sharply critical of his own lyrics (he said the hit “I Feel Pretty” from West Side Story was better suited to a Noel Coward character than to his teenage Puerto Rican heroine). Here the clever, sometimes smart-alecky words perfectly suit the characters–brassy Jazz Age Brooklynites on the eve of the Depression. And the music is no mere pastiche, though it acknowledges Gershwin, Berlin, and Ellington; prettier and structurally simpler than the spiky, semioperatic scores of Sweeney Todd and Sunday in the Park With George, it’s almost always bracing and distinctive, punctuated by Sondheim’s characteristic staccato accompaniment patterns and quicksilver chromatic harmonies. (Crisp reed and horn arrangements by Sondheim’s longtime orchestrator, Jonathan Tunick, bring out the delicious details.)
Saturday Night’s zingy songs are wedded to a sharp, strong book. Epstein–whose long list of screenplays includes Casablanca, written with his twin brother, Philip, and Howard Koch, as well as film versions of works by James Thurber (The Male Animal), George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart (The Man Who Came to Dinner), and Peter DeVries (Pete ‘n’ Tillie and Reuben, Reuben)–here drew directly on his own family. He and coauthor Philip (who’d died by the time Saturday Night was written) were inspired to write Front Porch in Flatbush by the misdeeds of a third brother, and the musical brims with a Brooklyn bonhomie that recalls Neil Simon’s autobiographical Brighton Beach trilogy. Saturday Night could use some trimming, especially in the erratic and somewhat contrived second act (compressing the narrative’s time frame would help the story enormously). But Epstein’s screwball plot, quirky dialogue, and thorough understanding of his characters’ flavorful yet constricted lives anchor the songs in a way that the frustratingly flawed scripts for later Sondheim shows like Company, Follies, and Assassins fail to do.
Jeff Bauer’s simple set, prettily lit by Shannon McKinney, nicely transports the action from a Flatbush front porch to a “swellegant” Manhattan nightclub, framing conductor Thomas Murray’s first-rate band in a way that keeps the musicians visible but never makes them obtrusive–appropriate to a show whose main attraction is the composer’s eventual stature. It would be nice if Sondheim could give us one of these every year for the next 40 at least.
