TRANSPARENT COULD ONE DAY TRANSITION
FROM COCOON TO BUTTERFLY
A Transparent Musical is based on the Amazon Prime TV series Transparent and written by the TV show’s creators – Joey Soloway and Faith Soloway. Yet while it features many of the same characters and themes as the TV show, this is a brand-new standalone story. Under Tina Landau‘s overwhelmed direction, it’s bursting with creativity, but the show could use heavy trimming and song tweaking. As a musical comedy, it could go far one day, but it takes its welcomed themes of diversity and acceptance far too seriously, especially in the second act, when it becomes positively soporific. Plus, characters get equally big stories that end up drowning each other out. Still, A Transparent Musical, which opened this week at the Mark Taper Forum, is pocked with some gems in performance, humor and storytelling. It’s loveably quirky, like a cat with three legs and one eye, until, that is, the cat dies.
The Cast
Sarah Stiles, Adina Verson, and Zachary Prince
It starts with a delightful preshow. We are in the auditorium at the CCJ JCC (Cecile J. Janowitz Jewish Community Center) resplendent with children’s artworks, community notices, and Purim Carnival posters on the walls. Adam Rigg’s scenic design lit by Jen Schriever in neon pinks, greens, and blues is an eye-popping environmentally immersive delight. We see entertaining characters milling about onstage and throughout the audience in a heightened energy getting ready for a meeting. Particularly funny were a bejeweled mother in a lime-green running suit shouting pass codes into her cell phone, and a very exuberant young man in a tucked white shirt and yarmulke dashing all around being humorously officious and ultra-cool at the same time, or so he thinks. He reminded me of my friends Saul and Debra Mendelson’s son Ethan when I attended his bar mitzvah. While these characters were quirky and funny, there remained a respectful baseline of truth about them.
Daya Curley and Adina Verson
We follow the story through the youngest of the Pfefferman family, Ali, who navigates the ups and downs of self-discovery much better than most. Ali’s Los Angeles Jewish family is filled with secrets, but when dad Mort transitions to the transgender matriarch, Maura, the family is forced to confront their own identities and navigate their relationships with each other. Through a revelatory tale of acceptance and self-expression, Transparent explores the intersection of Jewish and queer history while celebrating the imperfectly human and startlingly familiar aspects of a universally relatable family.
Murphy Taylor Smith and Zachary Prince
The Cast
As Ali, the fabulous Adina Verson captures the frustration and angst of one who searches for connection and validation. Verson has a knockout voice and handles Faith Soloway’s songs with strength and insight. The show’s opening number “Standing Order” proved to be a witty exuberant introduction to the world of the Pfefferman’s. The side-splittingly funny Liz Larsen plays mom, Shelly. Did I say she’s funny? Larsen’s got it all. She sings, she’s sexy, AND she can DANCE. She shines throughout the show, always getting a laugh, especially in the hilarious “The Secret to a Marriage” where she professes the ability to keep secrets is the way to keep a marriage going. Larsen makes the number such a crowd pleaser that I expected an encore and a sendoff. It’s screaming out for a bigger button. It’s that good!
The cast of A Transparent Musical
The cast of A Transparent Musical
Musically, most of the score is a great excuse to laugh, dance, and have fun, but there’s a lot of it — almost twenty songs, and they don’t have a great track record for landing often. Sometimes, the more narrative, plot-driven songs feel a bit like the work of William Finn, the composer of Falsettos and A New Brain (hire HIM!) However, in the show’s second act, the songs became repetitive and numbing.
Daya Curley, Adina Verson, and the cast
Daya Curley and Adina Verson
Perhaps more variety in musical styles is needed. For instance, while much of the cast shined in their numbers, Dayla Curley as Maura was not as successful. Dramatically, she was right on when summoning the strength and courage to face her family and community with her revelatory truth — and the frustration and anger that that entails — but in her songs, particularly in the second act, her voice did not seem to match the material.
Adina Verson and the cast
There’s a terrific side story for Ali, who discovers a book about the last days of the Weimar Republic (think Cabaret) – and finds out that a distant relative may have been part of the radical group the Nazis termed degenerate. As Ali joins the German cabaret (ya know, time travel). I very much like the discovery Ali makes, but it’s a slow one. From there, it’s a great lead-in back the modern world, but that’s where the show makes a terrible turn in the second act. It should be about one or two of the Pfeffermans — although I applaud squeezing five seasons into one night — not the issues themselves. And when characters sing and sound the same in a piece, it keeps coming back to the songs, which need rethinking, and adjustments in the score. The second act opener “Jewish and Queer” may have been fun in almost a Village People pastiche way, but shouldn’t the music of 1930s Berlin be distinctly different from the rest of the score?
The show could most assuredly be fixed with a lot of work, and I want it to work.
Liz Larsen, Zachary Prince, Daya Curley, Adina Verson, Sarah Stiles
Peppermint
photos © 2023 Craig Schwartz Photography
A Transparent Musical
Center Theatre Group
Mark Taper Forum at the Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave. in Downtown L.A.
Tues-Fri at 8; Sat at 2:30 and 8; Sun at 1 & 6:30
ends on June 25, 2023
for tickets, call 213.628.2772 or visit CTG
