Theater review: 'They're Playing Our Song' by Reprise

Here we have a story of two people who want to be together but are kept apart by stumbling blocks of their own making. It's a frustration shared by those of us in the audience for "They're Playing Our Song," for although we want to fall for the show, we keep getting tripped up.

The frustration is all the keener because with this season-opening production, the musical-revival specialists of Reprise Theatre Company continue their progression toward ever more thoroughly realized, top-tier presentations (which materialize, miraculously, out of ridiculously brief rehearsal periods). What's more, the leading lady they've engaged, Stephanie J. Block, delivers a don't-miss performance.

But, oh, what an annoying show.

The musical by Neil Simon, composer Marvin Hamlisch and lyricist Carole Bayer Sager presents a highly fictionalized version of Hamlisch and Bayer Sager's personal and professional relationship. The show opened at the Ahmanson Theatre in December 1978, then headed to Broadway, where it played for 2 1/2 years.

On Broadway, the show contained just nine songs, rendering it more a play with music than a full-out musical. That play, alas, is a wan variation on Simon's "The Goodbye Girl."  

Vernon Gersch (played by Reprise's artistic director, Jason Alexander) is an award-winning composer, Sonia Walsk (Block) a rising lyricist. When they meet, at their agents' urging, to ponder a partnership, nervous energy crackles between them, but it's the sort of neurotic jitteriness and smart-alecky back-and-forth that exists only in Simon's romantic comedies of this vintage, not in real life.

The only other presences are the would-be lovebirds' inner Greek choruses (three singers apiece), which materialize in moments of duress. This is but one of many contrivances, the most irritating of which is a character, Sonia's ex, who's never seen but whose endlessly inventoried theatrics hinder the songwriters' romance.   

Alexander delivers nebbishy charm and sings in a pleasant pop baritone -- at first. Late in Wednesday's opening performance, he sounded ragged and out of his range.

In the flighty, voluble character that she's expected to play, Block manages to also convey fierce intelligence and emotional resilience. And then there's her 11 o'clock number, built to such a peak of bittersweet feeling that many in the audience finish the number wearing, as she does, a mask of tears. Block's pop-focused mezzo is one of the best in the business. Thank goodness that, after going so underused in "9 to 5," it's being heard again, to such shiver-inducing effect.

Revisions to the Reprise version, especially in the second act, boost the song count to 11, three of which are different from the Broadway score. An added song, "One Hello" (Hamlisch and Bayer Sager's theme to the movie "I Ought to Be in Pictures"), helps tidy the ending. But the mock melodrama of Vernon's inner tango about the ex, "Leon," is truly grating.

Still, director Lonny Price polishes it all to a sheen, on a set, by John Iacovelli, that whimsically places the entire story atop a giant late-1970s turntable. The Top 40s-sounding pop ballads seem, quite appropriately, to emanate from its flanking speakers. I think I once owned that stereo system.

-- Daryl H. Miller

"They're Playing Our Song," Freud Playhouse at UCLA. 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends Oct. 10. $70 and $75. (310) 825-2101 or www.reprise.org.  Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes.

Photo: Stephanie J. Block and Jason Alexander in a getting-to-know-you moment of "They're Playing Our Song." Credit: Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times.

Comments

[edward]

We attended the Wednesday performance, which was phenomenally and ridiculously good, considering the troupe's 2-week rehearsal schedule which I just learned about.

But Miller's correct: The characters are gratingly annoying, but that's Neil Simon's doing and this play - dated as it is - comes off as provincial and (dare I say?) myopically ethnic, when viewed through 21st century eyes.

Block and Alexander are wonderful; Block's vocal prowess is a privelege to witness - sheer art. Lonny Price's set design and direction are, in a word, brilliant. His opening montage, a virtual time machine that puts the audience in the proper time and place to best appreciate Simon's dated work is, in another word, genius.

In short, Broadway has come to Los Angeles. I love that, and I loved this show. Keep it up, Reprise. And congrats on a superb opening to what will be a great season.

[James]

This was one of my favorite broadway shows. Loved the Robert Klien and Lucie Arnaz production.

I found this production too long, with the new songs, that did not add to the show and set design and staging very boring. The opening montage was great.

I saw Thursday nights show and was disappointed in Alexander's protryal and singing voice. Block was awesome, stole the show for me.

I have no seen the show in several years but was comparing it to my last viewing at the Long Beach Light Civic Opera which was a better production in my opinion, the leads of Jack Wagner and Lorna Patterson were very good.

[edward]

Agree that the length of the Reprise production is an issue. I think it adds to, rather than detracts from, the show's overall 'shtickiness.' But I also think that this show can and will be tweaked on both fronts. As Miller states, Reprise is attempting high-calibre in minimal time and in this case, I hear it was no more than 2 weeks of rehearsals.