THEATER REVIEW
“Bull Durham: A New Musical”
Grade: B
7:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Thursdays; 8 p.m. Fridays; 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sundays. Through Oct. 5. $35-$85. Alliance Theatre, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E., Atlanta. 404-733-5000, www.alliancetheatre.org.
Bottom line: Music soars; cast uneven.
In “Bull Durham,” a poetry-spouting junior-college instructor named Annie Savoy fancies herself as the self-appointed fertility goddess of minor-league baseball. Declaring the great American pastime her one true religion, she has given up on Buddha, Allah and Christ to worship at the altar of a game that is steamy, guilt-free and forever ripe with sexual metaphor.
Some women go to bars to pick up men. But in the sleepy town of Durham, N.C., circa the 1980s, Savoy goes to the ballpark to cruise. During one crazy hot summer, described in Ron Shelton’s 1988 film that’s been adapted into a Broadway-bound musical at the Alliance Theatre, Annie gets caught in a tussle between “Nuke” LaLoosh, a rookie pitcher with a “million-dollar arm and a five-cent head,” and Crash Davis, a seasoned catcher who is brought in to tame the loose cannon.
That’s the essential setup of Shelton’s quirky romantic comedy, which has been brilliantly reimagined as a song-and-dance spectacle by composer Susan Werner, choreographer Joshua Bergasse and director Kip Fagan. While most of the material was already there for the taking in Shelton’s original screenplay, Werner knocks it out of the park with a first-string score of gospel, rock and folk numbers. Considering that neither Shelton (who contributes the book) nor Werner has any previous theater-writing experience, “Bull Durham” is a wildly impressive debut.
My major misgiving involves the casting of the love triangle.
Though Broadway chanteuse Melissa Errico is a proven interpreter of Sondheim, Lerner and Loewe and others, she comes across as stiff and humorless. Imbued with the classical mannerisms, say, of Bernadette Peters (whom she somewhat resembles here), Errico is almost too elegant and too beautiful to play the role of the daffy, New Age eccentric Annie, who seduces the boys of summer in a bedroom framed by a veritable macrame proscenium (nice touch by set designer Derek McLane).
In the film, Susan Sarandon played Annie as joyously naive; whereas Errico seems a bit too self-aware and poised to pull off Annie’s phony-baloney shenanigans and sexual charisma. That said, Errico is an excellent vocalist; her interpretation of her Carole King-esque solo, “A Little Time to Myself,” in particular, is a knockout.
I didn’t care much for John Behlmann’s spastic, Jim Carrey-style take on Nuke, either. While Tim Robbins brought a delicious sense of swagger to the part of a man so dumb he thinks Walt Whitman played baseball, Behlmann turns him into a clown with little sex appeal. Of this threesome, only Will Swenson’s Crash seems to live authentically in the moment; Swenson is a dynamic vocalist and a fine actor whose performance is smartly controlled and believable.
For me, the musical really finds its groove in the pairing of the virginal Jimmy (Jake Boyd) and the floozy Millie (Lora Lee Gayer). With their song “A Heaven for You,” “Bull Durham” soars. On the writing side, the newly added character of Hack (Joe Tippett) seems an attempt to unify the story line, beef up the ending and serve as a test for Annie and Crash, but it feels labored and unnecessary.
As for the dancing, Bergasse delivers mightily, with moves that traverse the line between ballet and baseball, poetry and muscle. On the design side, McLane contributes a series of handsome sets — from the baseball park to the beer hall to the bedroom. And Toni-Leslie James has fun with the ’80s costumes.
As a baseball-loving town, Atlanta will appreciate the patter of the sports announcer (Alpha Trivette), the tricks of the baseball clown Max (Joel Hatch) and the uniform that the wiser Nuke wears when he makes the big leagues. The show is mighty close to the home stretch, but before it moves to Broadway, it would be wise to trade two of its major players.
