Reunions

Tweet

Reunions is a charming new Edwardian musical made up of two classic one-act plays: James M. Barrie’s 1910 “The Twelve-Pound Look” and the Quintero Brothers’ 1901 “A Sunny Morning.” Using an ensemble of six main actors who rotate roles, these two one-act musicals have the same theme: former lovers meet years later by an accident that changes their lives. However, the Barrie play deals with a middle-aged couple in a London mansion while the Quintero play brings together two septuagenarians in a Madrid park. Beautifully directed by Gabriel Barre, this is an elegant evening worthy of its Edwardian ancestry.

Ironically, Jeffrey Scharf’s book and lyrics are more successful with the play originally written in Spanish than the one written in English. While Barrie’s play is a wise gem, Scharf has padded it with unnecessary flashbacks which tend to break up the mood and tempo of the story. In “The Twelve-Pound Look,” Harry Sims is to be knighted later in the week for services to Britain. While he and his wife Emmy practice his investiture with all but the sword which has not been delivered his butler shows in a typist hired to answer the letters of congratulations which have been piling up.

When Emmy asks to do it herself in order to feel useful, her chauvinistic husband replies, “Don’t be absurd. Answering my correspondences is a job for a secretary, not a job for my wife. Why if anyone found out you were writing replies, they would think we did not know how to conduct ourselves. It would be as if our dinner guests discovered you had prepared the meal instead of Cook.” Who should turn up as the hired typist, but Henry’s first wife Kate who walked out on him 14 years ago and has not been heard from since.

At first Henry considers sending her away immediately, but then he decides to make a deal: he wants to know who the man was that she left with and she wants to know how he took it when he read the letter she had left for him. He attempts to impress her by pointing out that she could have been Lady Sims if she had not left, but she is not dissuaded that she made the right decision. She warns him that if he treats his second wife the way he treated her he may have trouble yet again – although she admits that he treated her well according to his lights. She marvels at the difference between the portrait of his wife on her wedding day and the woman who she met on her way in. And then she tells him about the twelve-pound look that bored wives give their husbands.

As Kate, Chilina Kennedy makes the show entirely her own as a self-sufficient woman who earns her own living and has to answer to no one. Feisty, sassy and nervy, she runs rings around her ex-husband without his even knowing it. Bryan Fenkart’s Sir Harry is smug but misses being arrogant and imperious. While Courtney Reed is beautiful in Jen Caprio’s sumptuous gowns, she doesn’t really present the downtrodden woman her husband’s ambitions have made her. The rest of the cast of nine is excellent as their current servants and their guests in the flashback scenes.

Reset in 1910, “A Sunny Morning” brings together strollers out in a Madrid park. Elderly crotchety Don Gonzalo (Chip Zien) is out with his servant Juanito (Daniel Torres) and encounters equally old but mild tempered Dona Laura (Joanna Glushak) out feeding the birds with her maid Petra (Reed). The problem is that she is sitting on his bench which he now has to share with her. They begin talking about their youth in Valencia and each tells a story of two lovers that they both recognize, as they are telling their own stories. However, he says that it was told to him by his cousin and she says her best friend was the woman involved. In fact, by now they recognize each other but do not want to reveal that they know each other, both vain enough to not like what they look like all these 50 years later. They do agree to meet on the bench again on the next sunny day when they will have a chance to reveal their identities.

In this play, the new second scene is an improvement over the original in that it has a more satisfying ending. The acting of Zien and Glushak as the elderly lovers is superb, comic, sad, human, melancholy. Edward Pierce’s Edwardian interior with its floral rug and large autumn landscape is the perfect setting for the Madrid park with the addition of a park bench and some stationary birds. Jimmy Calire’s melodic music to lyrics by Scharf which are mostly clever patter songs to piano and cello in the first half (“The Day That We’re in Service to a Knight,”  “In a Room Like This,” “Dinner at the Sims”) segues into beautiful ballads backed by accordion and guitar (“She Was A Dream,” “Laura and Gonzalo,” “The Cover of  the Book”) in the second half. The lighting by Ken Billington and Mitchell Fenton bathes the stage in lovely light first for the Edwardian study and then for autumn in the Spanish park.

Reunions may seem old-fashioned to some but that is part of its charm. While most musicals today are brassy and loud with sound designs that drown out the words, this evening allows you to savor both words and music. Both plays offer wisdom from authors who were old enough to understand the ways of the world. In its further iterations, it should be suggested that an intermission be put in at the logical break between the two one-acts.

Reunions (through December 21, 2025)

Act Two Theatricals

New York City Center Stage II, 131 W 55^th Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, visit http://www.citycenter.org

Running time: one hours and 45 minutes without an intermission