A shallow tale

Pooh-poohing Pippin

by Bill Rodriguez

PIPPIN. Directed by Paula McGlasson. With Michael Backes, Andrew Lidestri, Kevin Traver, and Daniel Houle. At URI Theatre through December 10.

You have to give them credit. The troupe at URI Theater has staged a snazzy version of the musical Pippin. There's plenty of twinkle-toed hoofing inspired by the original Bob Fosse choreography and a superb job by the title character.

The show won four Tony Awards in 1973 and launched the careers of lyricist Stephen Schwartz and actors Ben Vereen and Ann Reinking. The tale about a confused young prince trying to find himself ran for nearly 2000 performances on Broadway.

Sadly, the talent on display way back when and currently is all to serve up awfully thin soup. To put it another way, no matter how many peacock feathers you use to gussy it up, a turkey is still a turkey.

Call me fussy, but I feel compelled to raise a finger in a j'accuse. Pippin, I submit, is a case study in all tha has been shallow and insincere about Broadway as a marketplace for musical trinkets. The story being told is as shallow as its antihero title character.

An original touch of this production has the identity quest presented as a film being made about his life. Original but schizophrenic. That is, on the one hand a beret-clad director (Andrew Lidestri) is moving a cameraman about and instructing actors in their scenes, but the Pippin actor remains in character throughout and the story is treated as a series of confrontations with the actual prince. The film soundstage is mostly bare, with pipe scaffolding wheeled about and minimal costumes, to keep us mindful that this is all a theatrical rather than a literal presentation.

Poor Pippin. (They changed his name from Pepin as well as the fact that he was hunchbacked.) First born, heir to the throne of Charlemagne, the 8th-century Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, we meet a boy who is vaguely dissatisfied because he "won't rest until I know I'll have it all." Step-brother Lewis (Kevin Traver) -- the name unaccountably changed from the historical "Louis" -- is understandably the favorite of Pippin's stepmother Fastrada (Heidi Beckmann). More importantly, for reasons we're not privy to, he isn't thought much of by their father (Daniel Houle), who wants Lewis but not his eldest son to come on a campaign against the Visigoths.

With that we get an anti-war lesson for Pippin, between his father singing the ironic "War Is a Science" and the aftermath of battle, hacked limbs littering the stage like bloody windfalls. During the carnage, we see unflinching film clips of the most gruesome moments from war films, from Catch-22 to The Last of the Mohicans, to impressive effect. (Video projections are also well used before each act, especially after intermission when we see the Pippin actor frustrated rehearsing a tricky dance routine.)

Director Paula McGlasson's film metaphor is original, but it doesn't succeed as a replacement for Fosse's magic motif. This can't very well be both an unfolding of Pippin's life from within it and simultaneously an outside view from the perspective of the director, designated Leading Player in the cast list. We already have the theater metaphor of life as a strutting and fretting on a stage, which now gets in the way.

Fortunately, Michael Backes makes a terrific Pippin, not only giving the whining antihero enough affable personality to keep us fond of him but also having quite a pleasant voice. But Backes has his hands full keeping us from shouting "Do it!" in the eventual suicide-temptation scene. We're supposed to identify with Pippin as Everyman, searching for meaning in a cruel world, but as written this brat doesn't balance his self-pity with anything like, oh, simple humanity. (His comforting a boy with a sick pet duck hardly counts, since it's so reluctant.)

Backes gets good help, such as Lidestri as the chillingly cool director, with all those haughty Fosse poses and gestures. Joanna Lynn Beecher makes a gracious Catherine, the widow who takes Pippin in as a derelict on the road.

We get a surprising star turn in one set piece that gaudily decorates the slim storyline: Anita Cipolla as Berthe, Pippin's entertaining grandmother. Her advice song, "No Time at All," is a treat Cipolla delightfully delivers, although the musical's knack for trivializing the significant comes across in such lines as "I never wondered if I was afraid when there was a challenge to take/I never wondered how much I weighed when there was still one piece of cake."

A big round of applause goes to choreographer Michelle Gonya and the dance ensemble for a much more skillful and ambitious dance component than we have any right to expect in a college production.

It was wonderful to see all this talent on display. It's a shame it was showing off such a hollow effort.