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The New York Musical Theatre Festival 2015 A clean, melancholy echo is evident throughout the music that Karl Hinze has composed for 210 Amlent Avenue, an entry at the New York Musical Theatre Festival that completes its run today. The sounds seem to embody all the basic themes of this twisty, messy piece—loss, regret, hopes evaporated, and so on—though the setting they suggest is less the real one used by Hinze and librettist Becky Goldberg, the Hamptons, than a cabin secluded in the mountains, or perhaps overlooking the moors. Not everyone derives tony joy from this chunk of Long Island, and boy, will the writers let you know it. You get no cleaner sense of character from the evening than this, which is too bad in a musical that obviously prides itself on its plot. Goldberg has crafted a detail-choked narrative about Judah (Zal Owen), a young poet now living in New York City who returns to his hometown for a goodbye party thrown by a family friend named Mrs. Jordan (Robin Skye). A retired actress of some fame, she's been adrift since her husband's death and wants to return to the city to push forward her idea of a TV series inspired by Edith Wharton's novel, The House of Mirth, but that first means selling the house and exorcising its ghosts. Yet the more Mrs. Jordan tries to put her past behind her, the more she ends up sabotaging her own future, and that of the people around her. Given the sheer number of relationships and twists in the story, it should all be far more involving than it is. But Goldberg's investigations are shallow, hampered by the constant intrusion of songs that do little more than reinforce the emotional despondency that infects everyone. There are a couple of respites, both provided by Steven Hauck and Nikki van Cassele as the well-meaning neighbors, but these can't redirect the prevailing tone. Only in "Nowhere Like," an awkward, overlapping tableside conversation about the relative merits of urban and suburban living, are identifiable personalities captured and interesting musical possibilities explored on a broader scale. It's not fear of death that defines these people, it's different (and incompatible) ideas about living, and that seldom comes through the sung dialogue and low-impact, petering-out arias that constitute much of the score. Even so, Owen paints an amiable picture of a man at a crossroads in his life and who's willing to fight to go down the right path; it's a refreshing portrayal here, showing us how someone can be at once constrained and freed by the responsibility he adopts. Likewise, Jen Brissman finds a deep, unsettling resignation in the impossibly young woman who works for Mrs. Jordan, but highlights instead a positive attitude, resulting in an aching disconnect that brings you to her rather than pushing you away. It's something you don't get from Lisa Birnbaum, who highlights only the opportunism and not the compassion of Judah's girlfriend, Sarah, or Roger Yeh, who just comes across as creepy in his playing of Mrs. Jordan's accountant, Nick. As for Skye, she's never convincing as the scheming, secret-keeping Mrs. Jordan, and can't make the character's contrived misdirection or eventual, baseless sympathy-baiting seem natural. She wants us to believe she's the victim, and over time we see just how true that isn't. (Let's say that her choice of The House of Mirth as a property is no accident.) But she's too cool, too calculating for us to care about, and a score that reinforces this makes her a poor foundation on which to build any sort of a dramatic structure. Though Samantha Saltzman's direction is bare-bones effective in its sphere, it, like the actors, can only do so much to overcome the strictures of a musical that doesn't want to sing, or maybe even simply acknowledge, the music that's been forced upon it.
210 Amlent Avenue
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