Bright Lights, Big City
Runs through March 22 at freeFall Theatre, 6099 Central Ave., St. Petersburg, 727-498-5205, 7 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. $21-$46, students, teachers, seniors, military $21-$43. freefalltheatre.com.
Years ago, playwright Samuel Beckett opined that the problem facing the contemporary playwright was to find “a metaphor for this mess.” Although the dour Irishman was no doubt speaking about an existential malaise, there are other messes in this society that cry out for dramatic treatment, and one of them is the subject of Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney’s 1984 novel, now showing in a fine stage adaptation at freeFall Theatre.
The quagmire McInerney analyzed — and that Paul Scott Goodman (book, music, and lyrics) has made into an efficient 90-minute musical — is the world of urban angst and anomie, of mind-numbing drugs, meaningless sex, anesthetizing music and disconnection so widespread, a moment of true rapport comes as an astonishment. Thanks to Goodman’s brilliant reworking of McInerney’s material, and the performing of a universally splendid freeFall cast, Bright Lights delivers just what Beckett called for: an image of our discomfort, of our confusion and disarray. Thirty-one years after McInerney’s novel was first published, this chaos is still familiar.
The musical focuses on Jamie (“You” in the novel), a fact-checker at a New Yorker-like magazine whose planet is imploding as we watch. His up-and-coming model wife has just left him for a French photographer, his job is threatened by an editor who despises him, the novel he was writing now sits in the trash bin, and the solutions he’s been banking on — cocaine and one-night hookups — don’t seem to solve anything. He has other troubles, too: he misses his dead mother, whose favorite he was, and won’t speak to his brother, who’s becoming increasingly hostile. Played and sung superbly by Lucas Wells, Jamie is surprisingly likable, a boy-next-door whom we want to see happy, but who’s so addicted to the high life, he doesn’t realize that it’s killing him. This is a complicated role, and it’s played flawlessly by Wells. I can’t imagine anyone else being so right.
As Jamie’s rapidly receding wife Amanda, Kara Konken is also top-notch. Konken’s Amanda has Jamie beaten in the life hedonistic; while his playground is New York, hers is the whole world, or at least anywhere a top model might stalk down a runway in the latest fashions. If Amanda has any regrets about the alacrity with which she threw over her husband, she certainly doesn’t show them; in this sense, she resembles Tad, Jamie’s friend who exhibits a “strict refusal to acknowledge any goal higher than the pursuit of pleasure.”
Tad, played kinetically by Clinton Harris, is the devil on Jamie’s shoulder, enticing him to yet another club, another line of blow. Then, just when it seems Tad offers nothing but oblivion, he introduces Jamie to his cousin Vicky — portrayed radiantly by Sarita Amani Nash — and Jamie’s stunned to meet a woman of real substance, with an interest in philosophy and a genuine kindness. But the glow is soon dimmed by the ill will of Clara, the magazine editor with no patience for a fact-checker who who’s too blitzed from last night’s clubbing to be able to do his job. Heather Krueger is fun to hate as vicious Clara, and just as pleasant to love as Jamie’s mother, seen in flashbacks as a good woman with nothing but affection for her golden son. But there’s another son — Jamie’s brother Michael, played solidly by Nick Lerew — and he’s not above throwing a punch at the guy who’s recently been ignoring all his calls. There are other characters too: Jamie’s workmate Megan, a lost girl named Mary, and Amanda’s new beau. Each manages, for a few moments at least, to distract Jamie from distraction. But can anyone save him?
If there’s a flaw to Bright Lights, it’s not Goodman’s sharp lyrics or lively music. The only problem in this production is its set — or rather its lack of one. What designer Matt Davis provides is basically a walkway around a small pit (with in-the-round seating), and though a desk area and toilet (for those club bathrooms) are placed near it, one can’t help but miss a visual, emotionally powerful expression of Jamie’s turmoil. Still, Eric Davis’s direction on this bare walkway is first-rate, and the projections on the theater’s walls are at least a gesture toward more scenic imagination. Finally, Scott Daniels’ costumes are inventive, and the live band is terrific. Most memorable song: “I Hate the French,” with lines like “I’ve never met/A French mensch.” There’s also a rhyme with “Judi Dench.”
So, this one’s a winner. It’s good to see our society’s insanity captured so forcefully, and shown to us like a mirror on our nature. Kudos to freeFall and artistic director Eric Davis, who once again has lived up to his satisfyingly lofty standards.
This article appears in Feb 26 – Mar 4, 2015.