From: murray@aristotle.ils.nwu.edu (Thomas Murray)
Subject: Anna Karenina (review)...
Organization: The Institute for the Learning Sciences, Evanston, IL
Date: Fri, 4 Sep 1992 14:38:42 GMT

Saw this on the net (in clari.news.arts).  It is reproduced here
without permission.  Thought others might be interested.

-tom


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From: clarinews@clarinet.com (FREDERICK M. WINSHIP, UPI Senior Editor)
Newsgroups: clari.news.arts,clari.news.interest.people,clari.local.nyc
Subject: Anna Karenina: The Musical is a Broadway blooper
Keywords: plays, stage, entertainment industry, misc industry, people,
	human interest
Date: Thu, 3 Sep 92 7:40:24 PDT
Location: new york, new york city, new jersey
ACategory: usa
Slugword: broadway
Priority: regular
Format: regular
ANPA: Wc: 711; Id: z3206; Sel: nyesp; Adate: 9-3-1040aed
Codes: &esprny., &boernx., &nhprnj., tncn....

	NEW YORK (UPI) -- The Circle in the Square's world premiere production
of ``Anna Karenina'' is an honest attempt to make a musical out of the
Russian classic but it lacks the emotional intensity that propels Leo
Tolstoy's story of adulterous love in a ultra-conventional society.
	The fact that this two-and-a-half hour Broadway show, worked up in
the course of two years from a BMI Theater Workshop piece, seems longer
than the 700-page novel is a physical reaction to the blandness of what
should be a moving evening in the theater.
	By reducing Tolstoi's plot and cast of characters to a manageable,
even intimate outline of the novel, librettist Peter Kellogg, a onetime
singer and freelance writer, has flattened the tragedy and robbed it of
drama. He could have learned something about how to treat a classic by a
visit to ``Les Miserables.''
	Worst of all, there is nothing Russian about this ``Anna,'' whose
characters speak and sing American colloquialisms such as ``whadda ya
know'' and ``okay.''
	Even so, a really great pair of actors in the roles of Anna and Count
Vronsky could have saved Kellogg's show, which has some charming though
derivative (read that Sondheimian) music by Daniel Levine, a TV arranger
and composer of industrial show scores.
	Ann Crumb as Anna works hard to give her character meaning but is
badly miscast, being more suited to play Regina in ``The Little Foxes,''
and Scott Wentworth as a curiously undashing Vronsky is a stolid,
unsmiling lover not worth leaving a husband for.
	Crumb, who brightened Andrew Lloyd-Webber's tedious ``Aspects of
Love,'' just doesn't have the presence or Old World elegance to play
Anna, although her singing voice is effective and less coarse than her
mannered acting.
	Without an acceptable Anna, the ingenue role of Kitty takes on an
unbalancing importance. Fortunately Kitty is in the expert hands of
Melissa Errico, making her Broadway debut. And a fine one it is.
	Pretty, pert and endowed with a lovely voice, Errico runs away with
every scene she is in, abetted by Gregg Edelman who plays her suitor,
Levin. Edelman was nominated for a Tony Award for Stine in ``City of
Angels'' and again proves he is an actor and singer of versatility,
freshness and magnetism.
	Yet Kitty and Levin are major examples of Kellogg's ill-advised
tampering with ``Anna Karenina,'' which goes as far as some rewriting of
the plot.
	His Kitty is not the sensitive girl of Tolstoy 's novel, nor is his
Levin the noble young man that the novelist so feelingly depicted. He
comes across as goofy and she as foolish in the manner of Rudolf Friml
and Sigmund Romberg's sillier operettas.
	The only persons in the cast who are completely credible from a
Tolstoyian viewpoint are Jerry Lanning as Anna's amoral but sympathetic
brother, Stiva, and John Cunningham as her priggish husband, Karenin.
Lanning turns in the more three dimensional performance but Cunningham
manages to humanize a role that is might be more caricature than
character in the hands of a lesser actor.
	And, of course, there is Erik Houston Saari as Seryozha, Anna's son,
doing what child actors do best -- upstaging his elders.
	This is the kind of show that is difficult to stage in the Circle in
the Square's arena theater, but director Theodore Mann has done it
expertly.
	The quick scene changes are gracefully accomplished and only the
placement of the small orchestra with two pianos behind the scenes is
unfortunate. The amplified music sounds tinny and occasionally out-of-
tune and the pianos tend to drown out the other instruments.
	James Morgan's scenic design with its Palladian arcade and painted
floor representing a Russian carpet is handsome and Carrie Robbins'
1860s costumes add Slavic sumptuousness to Paris chic. Mary Jo
Dondlinger's lighting, especially in the Moscow ballroom and Venetian
palazzo scenes, is enchanting.
	``Anna Karenina'' continues to defy musical treatment, even by
Russian composers. Leos Janacek, the Czech composer, had serious
intentions of transforming the novel into an opera but backed off. Let
us hope this Kellogg-Levine trivialization will let the matter rest.

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