A new Off Broadway musical, based on the best-selling young adult novel by Jodi Picoult and Samantha van Leer, is uneven but sweet, our critic writes.
What a tricky business adaptations are. A musical based on a novel can never be the same as its source material, and it isn’t meant to be. But throw out too many of the original elements and you leave an audience wondering how you lost your way.
Case in point: “Between the Lines,” the new Off Broadway musical based on the best-selling young adult novel of the same name, about a teenage romance thwarted by stubborn reality. The novel’s heroine, Delilah, lives in the same world we do, while Oliver, the boy she loves, is a fairy-tale prince trapped inside a book, forced to perform a princess-rescuing adventure each time a reader opens it.
He and the other characters spend their lives on perpetual standby, waiting to be called to speak their lines. They are actors, in other words, and everything that happens in Oliver’s world when the book is shut is essentially a backstage drama. But that theatrical setup, so vital to Jodi Picoult and Samantha van Leer’s 2012 novel, gets hardly a glance in the musical, directed by Jeff Calhoun (“Newsies”) at the Tony Kiser Theater.
The musical rebalances the story to center Delilah and her troubles. She’s a little older here — 17, not 15 — so her sudden interest in a children’s book is even more peculiar, but then again, she’s lonely. At school, she’s the friendless new kid; at home, she argues with her overwhelmed mother and misses her father, who left them and has a new family. It’s no wonder that her strongest impulse is to lose herself in fantasy.
When Oliver starts speaking to her, she thinks she’s imagining it, but he swiftly becomes the ideal boyfriend — if only she could figure out how to bring him into her world.
With a book by Timothy Allen McDonald and an innocuous score by Elyssa Samsel and Kate Anderson, “Between the Lines” has significant assets in Arielle Jacobs, who brings a savvy-sweet appeal to Delilah, and Jake David Smith, who makes Oliver a comically good-hearted naïf.
“I had a fight with my mom,” Delilah tells him one night, the fairy tale open to the only page where he’s alone and can speak freely. “She loses it every time I mention my dad.”
“Ah!” Oliver says, all sympathy. “Was he taken by a dragon?”
These two are adorable, and so is Frump (Will Burton), Oliver’s floppy-haired best friend — a human transformed by a curse into a dog, which does not help his chances with the princess he adores, Seraphima (cleverly played at the performance I saw by an understudy, Aubrey Matalon). Also winning: Wren Rivera as Jules, who in the novel is Delilah’s closest friend but here is a fellow outcast she’s only just met.
These characters leave you wanting more of them, while the musical spends time on the fractured relationship between Delilah and her mother, Grace (Julia Murney), who is made to look unaccountably drab when all she needs to look is tired. (Costumes are by Gregg Barnes; wigs, hair and makeup are by J. Jared Janas.) Too much oxygen is also given to the popular kids at Delilah’s school, in what feels like an attempt to lure theater’s “Mean Girls” demographic.
Jules, who is nonbinary here, isn’t permitted simply to be a cool person the way they might be in life. Instead, the show uses the character as an occasion for teachable moments about what it means to be nonbinary. It’s well intended but demeaning.
The musical makes a big deal of Delilah rejecting the fairy-tale notion of happily ever after in favor of shaping a more deeply fulfilling life. But the script forces antediluvian clichés on some of the grown-up female characters. Ms. Winx (Vicki Lewis), the school librarian, is a tragic spinster, warning Delilah not to end up in the same situation; Mrs. Brown (Lewis), the chemistry teacher, “has more plastic in her than the ocean” and is evidently sleeping with the principal. When Queen Maureen (Murney), Oliver’s fairy-tale mother, and the Lady in Waiting (Lewis) trade insults, they go like this: “Spinster.” “Wench.” “Lush.”
The musical does nail its very sweet ending, which is different from the ending of the novel. The show also gives Frump, the dog, a darling tap dance (choreography is by Paul McGill), and has fun with its book-lined set (by Tobin Ost).
But one of the show’s most enchanting visual effects — tableaus of Oliver and other fairy-tale characters upstage, as if illustrated on the page — has an unfortunate flaw: Faintly behind the scrim, we can see the actors clambering into and out of position. It doesn’t seem deliberate, just distracting. (Lighting is by Jason Lyons; projections are by Caite Hevner.)
For Delilah and Oliver to be together, it seems, they need to change the story he’s in so that they can follow their own narrative. “Between the Lines,” then, is an empowerment musical about using the agency you have to shape the existence you want.
This show’s creators certainly have used their own agency to rewrite a story. Alas, for them and the audience, the results are decidedly mixed.
Between the Lines
Through Oct. 2 at the Tony Kiser Theater, Manhattan; betweenthelinesmusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
