November 30–December 7, 1995

critical mass|theater

CAT'S CRADLE

Novel Stages at Plays & Players,1714 Delancey St., through Dec. 10, 893-1145.

Cat's Cradle is a complicated story about the end of the world. It's about a man writing a book about "the father of the atomic bomb" who, it turns out, created, before his death, an ultimate weapon: Ice Nine — a rearrangment of water molecules that turns all liquid solid. Besides fathering the bomb, he fathered three misfit children, all of whom wind up on a tropical island along with other assorted ambassadors, dictators, businessmen, wives, Hoosiers, beautiful native maidens, and a crackpot prophet (spelled "profit" in the program — one hopes for punning intentionality here, but hope is fading fast). The cast of ten play multiple roles. There is lots of Vonnegut-trademark invented lingo and self-important facetiousness about the wickedness of man and the irksomeness of God.

David Bassuk, who directed this musical adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's popular novel, told me that Vonnegut had come to Philadelphia for opening night and that he'd loved the show; there is, apparently, talk of its going to New York. (I hope it does. I hope it's a hit.)

But I wish I'd seen what he saw. The show I saw was a puzzlement: How can a play full of serious, interesting ideas (the nature of man, the problem of free will, God's plan for the world) seem so trivial? How can a funny book turn into something so stupefyingly humorless? How can so many talented people create a show that is so boring?

The problems seem to me to spring from Brian Joyce's adaptation: a plodding, unimaginative book, and silly, repetitious lyrics. There is one disappointment after another: having assembled an intriguingly Fellini-esque cast (a male midget, a giantess, fat people, skinny people, black people, white people), Bassuk uses them all too politely, trying to ignore their physical differences rather than play with them.

Kevin Francis, who has written impressive, often adventurous music for many shows around the city, has produced a score that is so clichd, so easy-listening as to be instantly forgettable. Myra Bazell, a strong avant-garde dancer/choreographer, has created movement for this show that is either unintelligible — many people on stage simultaneously moving in ways that are clearly supposed to illustrate some notion, but you don't know what it is — or hopelessly corny (the island queen's "modern" dance).

Jilline Ringle, a singer/actor whose work I have often admired, sings off-key in one song and, in another, caresses a clarinet in what should have been a parody of soft-core porno but wasn't. David Urrutia, a talented actor whose strength is in physical mime and movement, is forced to sing amateurishly off and on for nearly three hours. Novel Stages, having finally gotten into a theater with a real proscenium stage, can find nothing better to do with it than have set designer Daniel Tepe drape it with white sheets to represent ice.

A "wrang-wrang," we are told, is "a person who steers people away from a line of speculation" — a wrang-wrang or two might have come in handy back when somebody said, "Hey! Let's make a musical out of Cat's Cradle!"

— Toby Zinman