JUNO AT ENCORES!

The "musical" Juno opened and closed after a pitiably brief Broadway run in 1959 but gained in stature over subsequent years, largely due to the Columbia cast recording featuring Marc Blitzstein's score.

I put air quotes around the word musical because it isn't necessarily the best way to describe Juno—despite the way it was originally marketed. Based on the 1924 Sean O'Casey play Juno and the Paycock, the artful, fundamentally serious (yet still entertaining) Juno is certainly an example of musical theater, but it could also be viewed as a work of opera, perhaps as a piece of chamber opera, or as a chamber musical. However you might want to classify it, Juno can be seen and heard this weekend as the latest semi-staged revival in the Encores! series at City Center.

Set in strife-torn Dublin in the early 1920s, the Ibsenesque story revolves around the Boyle family, headed by Juno (Victoria Clark) and her strutting "paycock" of a husband Jack (Conrad John Schuck). We learn of their dreams of money and romance as well as their simmering grudges and shameful secrets, expressed in Joseph Stein's book as well as Blitzstein's lyrics and innovative music, well-informed by popular Irish dances and melodies. [Read more about Stein here.] Some of the highlights include the love song "One Kind Word" (sung by Michael Arden's Jerry Devine) to Celia Keenan-Bolger's Mary), the husband-and-wife parrying song "Old Sayin's," a simulation of gramophone music at a Boyle celebration, and just about any time that Clark and Keenan-Bolger show off their vocal skills, solo and duet. The original choreography was by Agnes de Mille; in this production, choreographer Warren Carlyle and the dancers evoke her style in a dream dance or two and enliven the proceedings elsewhere with some entertaining acrobatics.

The more I think about Juno, the more I admire it and suspect that its original run of 16 performances and subsequent obscurity (notwithstanding an occasional revival) might be one of the great injustices of Broadway. So credit is due to Encores! for programming what might turn out to be its most important revival so far. My only major criticism has to do with the staging, which doesn't play to the nosebleed section of the theater, where the sight lines were poor. Compounding the problem was the inaudibility of many lines, even with the unusually heavy amplification of the performances—this problem might have been due in part to Juno being less than ideal for a big house such as City Center (where I suggest choosing between an orchestra seat splurge or going for the cheap rear gallery seats—and then perhaps migrating into any empty front gallery seats). Putting aside such issues, I hope that the attention paid to this production of Juno leads to more fully realized revivals, perhaps in one of the smaller Broadway theaters and in other venues conducive to chamber opera or chamber musicals or whatever you want to call them.