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    Musical Adaptation of ‘Almost Famous’ Will Close on Broadway

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    The show, a passion project for Cameron Crowe, opened on Broadway in early November, but has faced soft sales in a competitive market.“Almost Famous,” a stage adaptation of the acclaimed 2000 film about a teenager who travels with a rock band while endeavoring to become a music journalist, will close on Broadway on Jan. 8 after an unsuccessfully short run.The musical, which had one of the season’s biggest budgets and best-known brands, began previews Oct. 3 and opened Nov. 3. The reviews were mostly not good; in The New York Times, the critic Jesse Green wrote that, despite the film’s charms, “the stage musical misses every opportunity to be the sharp, smart entertainment it might have been.”The show’s grosses have been so-so, and insufficient to consistently cover its running costs: during the week that ended Dec. 11, it grossed $765,060, while playing to houses that were only three-quarters full. At the time of its closing “Almost Famous,” which stars Casey Likes, Drew Gehling, Anika Larsen, Solea Pfeiffer and Chris Wood, will have had 30 preview performances and 77 regular performances.The musical is a passion project for Cameron Crowe, who won an Oscar for the film’s screenplay, which was based on his experiences as an adolescent (he also directed the film). Crowe wrote the musical’s book, while Tom Kitt composed the new music, and the two collaborated on the lyrics. The show, directed by Jeremy Herrin, also features a few pre-existing songs, the best known of which is Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer.”“Almost Famous,” produced by Lia Vollack and Michael Cassel, was capitalized for up to $18 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It has not recouped that money; the producers hope that the show will fare better beyond Broadway. (A cast album is to be released March 17, and the producers said in a statement that they anticipate “many productions in communities across the country and world, for years to come.” One probable destination: Australia, where Cassel is one of the biggest commercial producers.)Like Crowe himself, the show spent its formative period in San Diego: It had a pre-Broadway production in 2019 at the Old Globe Theater there. The Los Angeles Times declared it “an unqualified winner.” More

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      Review: In ‘Almost Famous,’ the Heart of Rock ’n’ Roll Flatlines

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      Cameron Crowe’s 2000 film, set in the world of bands and groupies, does not survive its Broadway musical transplant.At its best, rock ’n’ roll is “a form that is gloriously and righteously dumb” — or so decrees Lester Bangs, a character in the new musical “Almost Famous.”Alas, the show, which opened on Broadway on Thursday, gets the wrong part of that formula right. Though celebrating the rock world of 1973, when the real Lester Bangs was the field’s most influential critic, “Almost Famous” is neither glorious nor righteous. It barely even has a form.That leaves dumb, and I’m sorry to say that despite the intelligence of the 2000 movie on which it’s based, and the track record of its creators, the stage musical misses every opportunity to be the sharp, smart entertainment it might have been. In retelling the story of a 15-year-old who gets sucked prematurely into the world of bands and groupies and roadies and drugs, it lands instead in a mystifying muddle, occasionally diverting but never affecting.It needn’t have been that way; the source material is rich. But perhaps because the story is semi-autobiographical, Cameron Crowe, who wrote and directed the movie, apparently saw little reason to rethink it for the stage. The 15-year-old, William Miller (Casey Likes), still sets out, under the tutelage of Bangs (Rob Colletti), to be a rock journalist. When Rolling Stone, thinking he is much older, assigns him to cover a middling band called Stillwater — a composite of several groups Crowe actually toured with — William is torn between Bangs’s warning not to befriend his subjects and his own craving to be cool.But musical theater is a radically different beast from film, let alone life, and Crowe, working with the composer and co-lyricist, Tom Kitt, and the director Jeremy Herrin, does not seem to have accounted for that. The screenplay limited itself to William’s point of view, revealing the other main characters — especially Stillwater’s frontman, Russell Hammond, and his muse, Penny Lane — through the boy’s adoring eyes. William himself was characterized almost entirely by the act of watching, which was sufficient and even necessary to Crowe’s purposes.Solea Pfeiffer as Penny Lane, with Likes’s William. The Broadway show, our critic writes, reduces the story to little more than a love triangle linking William, Penny and Stillwater’s frontman, Russell Hammond.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA musical can’t work that way. If he’s going to sing — and if he’s the protagonist he has to — William must have something worth singing about. But Crowe and Kitt have given him only one real solo, the excellent “No Friends,” which is engaging because it grapples with a real conflict the boy faces. One is not enough, and though Likes, making his Broadway debut at 20, is appealing in the role and delivers when given the chance, there’s a hole at the center of the story that no amount of stage business can disguise.Not that Herrin doesn’t try. “Almost Famous” is one of the busiest book musicals I can recall, the stage so constantly and minutely activated (with choreography by Sarah O’Gleby) that it soon seems as flat and futile as an ant farm. Big moments, like Hammond’s acid-fueled dive from the roof of a house into a swimming pool, barely register; the settings by Derek McLane are resolutely unspectacular. And even in ordinary moments, filled with overdrawn caricatures slamming into one another, it’s often difficult to locate the important information amid all the empty industry.The same underwhelming overload hampers the music, which is obviously a bigger problem for a musical. Of the astounding 30 numbers listed in the program, only seven are what I’d call real theater songs. They are useful in establishing William’s overprotective mother (tartly played by Anika Larsen) and, in “Morocco,” the show’s best tune, Solea Pfeiffer’s dreamy but slippery Penny. “The Night-Time Sky’s Got Nothing on You,” a duet for her and Russell (Chris Wood), sounds, as it should, like an actual love song of the era, but for once with lyrics that trace a theatrical arc.Unfortunately, most of the rest of the songs are fragments, reprises or ensemble numbers so spliced with dialogue and served up in small bits as to nullify their expressive value. Some of them might be quite nice — Kitt’s melodies are never uninteresting — if they could just be sung through.But the show’s biggest musical problem comes from the fact that an unmanageably large proportion of its songs, perhaps a third, are covers. Originally made famous by the likes of the Allman Brothers Band, Deep Purple, Stevie Wonder and Led Zeppelin, these are performed diegetically, in whole or in part, in concert or backstage scenes.The use of covers made sense in the realistic format of the movie, where they add granular texture to William’s love affair with the world he was watching. But in the fundamentally surreal world of a musical, familiar pop tunes are like junk food, providing a ping of stimulation with no nutrition. Ending the first act with the company singing Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” — staged for our pleasure, not William’s — thus seems like a cheat and a sop.Foreground from left: Likes (kneeling), Brandon Contreras, Chris Wood and Drew Gehling in the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA musical is not, ideally, a singalong. Nor is it a tone poem, in which it might be sufficient for songs simply to create a mood and please the ear. (At least the ones here do please the ear; they are for the most part well performed, if rarely with any special charisma.) Even the best of recent jukebox musicals have demonstrated the form’s inherent pitfalls in the process of overcoming them; the worst have demonstrated its bankruptcy. So why did the producers and the creative team of “Almost Famous” fall at least partway into the same traps?I can only conclude that they wanted to hedge their bets on material that as originally conceived seemed commercially dangerous. A quiet, personal look at the way a loud, popular medium inflates and then punctures private dreams may not have seemed very Broadway.And yet that’s exactly what coming to Broadway — a loud, popular medium if ever there was one — has done to “Almost Famous.” The workaround reduces the story to a far more conventional one, little more than a love triangle linking William, Penny and Russell. With no broader implications to give it gravitas, no real investigation of the way the rock revolution altered our concepts of celebrity, it floats away into the jukebox ether.If you believe that Lester Bangs’s precept applies equally to musicals — and it’s true that many fine ones are gloriously and righteously dumb — you might not mind that. But if you care about the form, you may wish “Almost Famous” had aimed (as its Stevie Wonder cover urges) for higher ground.Almost FamousAt the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, Manhattan; almostfamousthemusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      An Immersive ‘Next to Normal’ Debuts in Barcelona

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      The Broadway musical and its Tony-winning star, Alice Ripley, return to the stage in this condensed and deconstructed production.BARCELONA, Spain — When Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey began writing their 2008 rock musical, “Next to Normal,” they wanted to create a piece in which, according to Yorkey, they could “bring the audience into the mind of the main character.” That character, Diana Goodman, is a suburban wife and mother with bipolar disorder who grapples with the harrowing symptoms of her mental illness while trying to maintain a functional life.The emotional musical not only won acclaim — it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2010 — but also resonated with theatergoers, playing on Broadway at the Booth Theater from 2009 to 2011. In his review, Ben Brantley wrote that the show “gives full weight to the confusion and ambivalence that afflict not only Diana but also everyone around her.”Now, audiences here are experiencing “Next to Normal” in a whole new way through an immersive, hourlong production that recently opened at the Festival Grec de Barcelona. This version, stripped of its props, sets and live orchestra, is being presented in a venue with an open-floor plan, a surround-sound system and 360-degree projections. The cast performs in English, with Spanish and Catalan supertitles, alongside the audience members, who sit in small cubes and become ghostlike witnesses sharing living quarters with the Goodman family.Alice Ripley, who originated the part of Diana, has returned to the role, and she shares the stage with Andy Señor Jr., who plays her husband, Dan; Lewis Edgar, who portrays her son, Gabriel; Jade Lauren, who plays her daughter, Nathalie; and Eloi Gómez, who is Nathalie’s love interest, Henry. But some of Ripley’s most thrilling exchanges occur with an actor thousands of miles away: Adam Pascal, who plays her “rock star” doctor, and who, in a nod to the pandemic, holds his sessions with her via Zoom. Ripley and Pascal rehearsed their scenes together in Florida (he is performing in the national tour of “Pretty Woman: The Musical”), and the recordings of his scenes make Pascal appear to be a larger-than-life figure, adding to the show’s surreal effect.“I would venture to say that I am now the first actor to perform simultaneously in the United States and Barcelona in two different shows at the same time,” Pascal wrote in an email.Ripley won a Tony Award for her role as a woman grappling with mental illness. The immersive show features wall-to-wall screens, with imagery of abstract landscapes meant to evoke Diana’s inner state. David Ruano“Next to Normal” is being produced by the Grec Festival, Layers of Reality and Pablo del Campo, who first saw the musical in 2010 and became obsessed with it. (At the time, he was working as the worldwide creative director of the advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi, splitting his time between London and New York.) Struck by Diana’s emotional ordeal, he said he felt the story needed to be translated into other languages and began working on a Spanish-language adaptation during layovers. A determined del Campo soon found himself pitching his idea directly to Yorkey, and not long after, the Spanish-language production, titled “Casi Normales,” was onstage in Buenos Aires, where it has been running for 10 years.But that wasn’t the end of del Campo’s involvement with “Next to Normal.” In early 2020, weeks before Covid-related lockdowns began, del Campo had what he called “a moment of electroshock” while visiting an artificial intelligence exhibition at the IDEAL Center d’Arts Digitals de Barcelona, which specializes in producing and showcasing digital arts projects. As he watched robots translate texts into visual displays, del Campo said he envisioned Diana in the number “Wish I Were Here,” in which she sings, “When the bolt of lightning crashes / and it burns right through my mind.”Before long, del Campo approached Kitt and Yorkey with his idea for an immersive production, and they — surprisingly — agreed to compress their two-act, nearly two-and-a-half-hour musical. Some scenes of dialogue were cut, but all the big musical numbers remain. The British director Simon Pittman was brought in to oversee the project, and Søren Christensen and Tatiana Halbach, who work under the name Desilence, created the visuals (including abstract landscapes meant to evoke Diana’s inner state). “There’s something to look at everywhere you turn,” Christensen said. “It’s like ‘Dogville’ meets a music video.”Reflecting on the richness of the production’s images, he added: “If movies are 4K, and really good-looking movies are 8K, this is up to four times that.”During a recent rehearsal at IDEAL, the cast was practicing “Who’s Crazy”/“My Psychopharmacologist and I,” a song about adjusting Diana’s medication. At first, the actors practiced their blocking in a completely empty space. Then the wall-to-wall screens lit up, and the actors were transported to a surrealistic world with ticking clocks, larger-than-life-size neurons floating like jellyfish, and pills resembling colorful raindrops falling from the sky. “We need more pills!” Halbach exclaimed at one point.The other element flooding the space was Ripley’s achingly emotional voice.“When we first made [Diana], I didn’t know what it was going to be — the audience watched me figuring it out live,” Ripley said, reflecting on the musical’s Off Broadway run at Second Stage Theater in 2008. She drew from that same feeling of adventure in tackling this new production, though she said she found the experience disorienting at first.“We actors are told never to give our backs to the audience,” she said, “and here all of those rules are gone.”The team behind the immersive production figured it was a no-brainer to bring back Ripley, who won a Tony Award for her portrayal of Diana, even in the wake of a 2021 report in The Daily Beast in which she was accused of “having sexual conversations with a girl as young as 13 and puppeteering a cult-ish, obsessive fan base of vulnerable youngsters.” Ripley later denied the accusations in a statement to The New York Post’s Page Six. “It is a misinterpretation of my actions to say I manipulated anyone, and more shockingly, that there was abuse,” she wrote in a statement.During a break from rehearsals last month, Ripley said she had no further comment about the accusations.Musical purists might clutch their pearls at the idea of a beloved Broadway show being deconstructed, but, as Pittman put it, “We’re doing a ‘Next to Normal.’” And Barcelona might just be the perfect locale for this experiment. After all, it’s the city of Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família, a towering basilica that’s been under construction since 1882 and a reminder that true masterworks can sometimes never truly be finished.Ripley, seated center, with from left: Lewis Edgar, Jade Lauren and Andy Señor Jr.David RuanoFor Pittman, directing one of his biggest shows to date felt like a throwback to his Fringe days in Edinburgh, which began in 2005, when he received rave reviews for his direction of “Hospitals and Other Buildings That Catch Fire.”“It’s like being in the underbelly,” he said, before adding: “I’ve never directed a show where you’re both building the process and the venue,” referring to the new technology that was installed at IDEAL to satisfy the production’s needs. (According to del Campo, the show’s budget is close to $1.2 million.)It’s been nearly 15 years since Ripley first inhabited the character of Diana. “Playing Diana is definitely more fun than it’s ever been,” Ripley said of her role in the production, which runs through Aug. 14. “I like to use my whole body to tell the story, and now I know people will be watching my hands or my heels or something.”She added: “I have gone through hell and back since I last played Diana,” referring to life-altering events like the death of her parents and changes in her body and her voice, “but this feels incredibly liberating. We come to the theater to be impacted like that, and to make an impact ourselves.” More

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      ‘Almost Famous,’ Now a Musical, Will Open on Broadway This Fall

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      The stage adaptation, with book and lyrics by Cameron Crowe and music and lyrics by Tom Kitt, will begin previews Sept. 13.“Almost Famous,” Cameron Crowe’s rock ’n’ roll coming-of-age story, will make its pandemic-delayed trip to Broadway this fall.A musical adaptation of the beloved 2000 film, the show had an initial run in San Diego in 2019, and its creative team then continued to work on the project while theaters were shut down by the coronavirus pandemic and as Broadway began to rebound.The musical is now scheduled to begin previews on Sept. 13 and to open Oct. 11 at an unspecified Shubert theater. It is the 11th show to announce performance dates for the new Broadway season, and at least two dozen more are circling.“Almost Famous” is Crowe’s semi-autobiographical story, set in 1973, about a teenage music journalist and his relationships with members of the band he is chronicling as well as the young women who follow it. Crowe wrote and directed the film, and won an Oscar for the screenplay; he has written the book and is a co-author of the lyrics for the musical.In an interview, Crowe described himself as “exuberant” about the Broadway transfer, saying, “I’m ready to share it with people.”“Every time I see the play I go back to being 15 years old,” he added.Crowe said he grew up seeing Shakespeare plays at the Old Globe in San Diego, where the musical began its life, and that he has found working in theater more “personal and soulful” than working in the film industry. And, he said, “something about telling a story about loving music draws music-loving people.”The Old Globe production garnered strong reviews, particularly from the critic Charles McNulty of The Los Angeles Times, who called it “an unqualified winner.”The score is mostly original, with music by Tom Kitt (“Next to Normal”) who collaborated on the lyrics with Crowe; the musical also features a number of pop songs, including Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” and Joni Mitchell’s “River.”The show is being directed by Jeremy Herrin (“Wolf Hall”) and choreographed by Sarah O’Gleby.The lead producers are Lia Vollack, a former Sony executive who is also the lead producer of “MJ,” the Michael Jackson musical, and the Michael Cassel Group, an Australian production company that has become increasingly active on Broadway. The show is being capitalized for up to $18 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.The role of the young journalist, named William Miller, will be played by Casey Likes, who also played the role at the Old Globe in San Diego; this will be his Broadway debut. (“He still looks young,” Crowe promised.)Chris Wood, best known for CW television shows including “Supergirl” and “The Vampire Diaries,” will make his Broadway debut as the band’s lead guitarist, Russell Hammond (played by Billy Crudup in the film). Anika Larsen (“Beautiful”) will take on the role of the protagonist’s mother, Elaine (played by Frances McDormand in the movie), and Solea Pfeiffer (“Hamilton”) will portray Penny Lane, Kate Hudson’s character in the film. The cast will also include Drew Gehling (“Waitress”) as the band’s lead singer, Jeff Bebe. More

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      Review: In ‘Flying Over Sunset,’ Getting High With the Stars

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      A new musical imagines the all-singing, all-dancing LSD trips of Aldous Huxley, Clare Boothe Luce and Cary Grant.To a perpetual square, nothing is as mystifying as another person’s high. Or so I learned in college, during the heyday of chemically induced inner journeys — and again at the Vivian Beaumont Theater the other night. Though sometimes mesmerizing, “Flying Over Sunset,” the new musical about LSD that opened there on Monday, is mostly bewildering, and further proof that transcendence can’t be shared.It admits as much in its structure, which throws into one scenario (by James Lapine) three famous seekers who never actually got high together. We meet them separately, starting with the philosopher and novelist Aldous Huxley (Harry Hadden-Paton), tripping at a Hollywood drugstore in the late 1950s. Next comes the greatest of all male movie stars, Cary Grant (Tony Yazbeck), demanding the drug — then legal — from his second wife’s psychiatrist. Finally we drop in on the playwright and diplomat Clare Boothe Luce (Carmen Cusack), hallucinating “a sapphire dragonfly” soon after being nominated as ambassador to Brazil.Much of this is true — if not the details of the visions then the settings and situations. But to advance the story beyond that, Lapine has to indulge in speculative nonfiction, a musical theater hallucinogen he has used to great effect before, in his play “Twelve Dreams,” inspired by Jungian imagery, and in his book for the musical “Sunday in the Park With George,” about the painter Georges Seurat. Perhaps recalling Seurat’s pointillistic technique, he writes in a preface to “Flying Over Sunset” that his script “connects the dots” of known history.It certainly connects the major players, bringing them together counterfactually, at the end of Act I, to discuss their common interest over champagne at the Brown Derby restaurant in Hollywood. In Act II, with the philosopher Gerald Heard (Robert Sella) as their “guide,” they indulge that interest together at Luce’s Malibu estate.Their trips take up perhaps two-thirds of the show — and 100 percent of the songs, by Tom Kitt and Michael Korie. As a concept, that makes sense, not just because music is arguably the most transcendent of art forms (and is often lovely here) but also because the characters, as Lapine presents them, apparently need to be high to be fully alive.Bottoms up: From left, Sella, Hadden-Paton, Cusack and Yazbeck prepare to embark on simultaneous LSD trips.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt’s hard to argue with him from personal experience; as he recently told The Times, he used LSD frequently while in graduate school. But the actual lives of Huxley, Grant and Luce do not support the idea that they were lacking in the rich complexity of humanity when sober.To correct for that problem, Lapine, who also directed the show, steers “Flying Over Sunset” in some very strange and ultimately tiresome directions. First, he assigns each character a buried emotional problem that needs resolving. Huxley is grieving the death of his wife. Grant, having never fully reconciled his imperturbable public persona with the terrorized child he once was, has problems with women. And Luce somehow feels guilt over the deaths of her mother and daughter, in car accidents she had nothing to do with.There’s an overly programmatic quality to that setup, especially as delivered in the exceedingly flat dialogue Lapine seems to favor. (“I think what’s interesting,” Heard says, “is that you each seem to be at a turning point in your lives.”) Perhaps the flatness is meant to set up the floridness of the trips, which compensate for the lack of real-world dramatic development by growing more and more outré as the show, at two hours and 40 minutes, wears on.The first of those trips is at least efficient in characterizing Huxley, whom Hadden-Paton winningly portrays as a goofy know-it-all nerd. Spotting a Botticelli monograph at the drugstore, he imagines characters from the painting “The Return of Judith to Bethulia” coming to life somewhat randomly around him, to the strains of some beautiful bel canto pastiche by Kitt and Korie. Here and elsewhere, you may be reminded of “Sunday in the Park” for its tableaux vivants and shimmering orchestral effects, if not for its thematic discipline.And Grant’s maiden trip, involving an otherwise flat-footed encounter with his younger self (Atticus Ware) and violent father (Nehal Joshi), allows for a showstopping dance routine to a music hall ditty called “Funny Money.” The choreography for Yazbeck and Ware, by the tap phenom Michelle Dorrance, almost obliterates any qualms about the song’s psychobabbly premise.But for an audience not invested in Lapine’s personal imagery, the second act, with its nonstop LSD sequences, goes quickly downhill. A number called “I Like to Lead,” in which Sophia Loren, Grant’s co-star in the 1958 movie “Houseboat,” slaps him around in an allegory of female domination, is incoherent. Another, in which Grant imagines himself as a “giant penis rocket ship” on a “secret mission” to spare the earth from disaster, is merely mortifying. Luce’s visit to heaven to see her mother and daughter, in a song called “An Interesting Place,” is as banal as that title.Emily Pynenburg as Sophia Loren and Yazbeck as Cary Grant in a number recalling a scene from the 1958 movie “Houseboat.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt least there are compensations in the typically gorgeous technical wizardry of the Lincoln Center Theater production. The lighting (by Bradley King) and the projections (by 59 Productions) on Beowulf Boritt’s swirling-circles set — along with the immersively psychedelic sound by Dan Moses Schreier — bring us closer to the sensation of melting consciousness than the script ever manages. At times even the costumes (by Toni-Leslie James) seem to be tripping. And Dorrance’s choreography for the show’s opening, arranging the cast’s varying footfalls in rhythmic counterpoint, is sublime.These are not enough to outweigh Lapine’s failure to dramatize what he evidently sees as the life-enhancing possibilities of mind-altering drugs. If those possibilities exist, surely they are not to be found in a direct linkup of symptoms and cures, as proposed by “Flying Over Sunset.” During his Botticelli immersion, Huxley claims that his right eye, severely damaged from a childhood illness, has started “working” again. Grant and Luce, having faced unfinished emotional business, emerge from their trips refreshed and ready to move on.But LSD, on its own, is not psychoanalysis by other means. And if the drug offers access to a shared consciousness that can help humans connect, neither the show nor the subsequent lives of its real-life characters demonstrate it. Luce, a brittle charmer in Cusack’s smart rendering, drifted ever rightward politically; Grant married three more times.As for Huxley, despite his supposedly improved eyesight, his overall health deteriorated quickly. On his deathbed in 1963, he asked to be injected with 100 micrograms of LSD. He was still a believer — but in what? Some mysteries, this musical among them, are too interior to be understood.Flying Over SunsetThrough Feb. 6 at the Lincoln Center Theater, Manhattan; flyingoversunset.com. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘The Visitor’ Lags Behind the Times

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      The new musical, based on the 2008 film and delayed by the pandemic, debuts at the Public Theater. But its story of a white professor helping immigrants feels out of step with the moment.What comes to mind when you think about immigration, ICE and deportation? I’m willing to bet more than a few George Washingtons that it’s not “musical.” Perhaps it is doable to respect the politics around these issues and the immigrants trying to build a life in the United States in this format, but it’s tough. Which is why the new musical “The Visitor” feels so obtuse and helplessly dated.Dated because it is based on Tom McCarthy’s 2008 film, a well-meaning artifact of the post-9/11 years about a couple of undocumented immigrants helping a white middle-aged professor get a new lease on life. The film resonated in a time before we had a president who fiercely fought to keep immigrants out, and before calls for diversity echoed throughout our institutions.In the film, an economics professor named Walter Vale travels to New York City from Connecticut to attend a conference, but while there, he finds a young couple living in his long-neglected apartment: Tarek, a drummer originally from Syria, and Zainab, a Senegalese jewelry designer. He lets them stay, and Tarek teaches him the drums. They live there until Tarek is unfairly picked up by the police for an infraction he didn’t commit and put in a detention center for being undocumented.The musical, which opened on Thursday at the Public Theater, is directed by Daniel Sullivan and has a book by Kwame Kwei-Armah and Brian Yorkey, who also wrote the lyrics. Tom Kitt (who also teamed up with Yorkey for the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Next to Normal”) adds music to this story, which arrives onstage with only minor changes.Long in the works, “The Visitor” was scheduled to begin its performances in March 2020 — practically a century ago in Pandemic Time. To stage the project now without a more significant overhaul of the story was a bold choice, especially with masking and quarantining coinciding with a reckoning about how people of color and their stories are — or, more often, are not — represented in theater and the arts.That’s not to say there haven’t been any modifications. First, previews were pushed back a week last month after cast members raised issues around depictions of race and representation. Then the departure of one of the leads, Ari’el Stachel, was announced in what the theater called “a mutual decision,” and last-minute edits were made in an attempt to refigure the way whiteness was centered in the production.David Hyde Pierce stars as Walter, a widower whose career and emotional life are as stagnant as a glass of lukewarm milk. Ahmad Maksoud, who was Stachel’s understudy, takes on the charming Tarek, and Alysha Deslorieux is the firm and guarded Zainab. Jacqueline Antaramian rounds out the central cast as Mouna, Tarek’s concerned mother.Alysha Deslorieux, left, as Zainab and Jacqueline Antaramian as Mouna in the 90-minute show.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHyde Pierce delivers the most subdued version of his usual awkward nebbish with the occasional cantankerous quip. (“Wake up, you little snot rags,” he thinks while teaching his students in an early scene.) But there isn’t much setup for Walter; perhaps intentionally, given how much the show goes on to focus on its white protagonist.Part of it is Sullivan’s brusque direction, which speeds through some character-building dialogue then lingers on scenes that have the clunkiest exposition. And it’s also partly because of the congested score. While the film is quiet and pensive, the show is overstuffed — with seemingly every second of its 90 minutes filled with music.Kitt’s music has a generic pop sound that sometimes works, as in “Drum Circle,” a Disney-esque tune chock-full of lively, layered percussion; and “Heart in Your Hands,” a rather maudlin song with angelic harmonies. (Kitt’s score, particularly “Heart,” is further enlivened by Jessica Paz and Sun Hee Kil’s ethereal sound design.) But most of the time it doesn’t work; upbeat songs or soft, slowed-down percussion feel at odds with the heavy subject matter.This is especially baffling in the energetic “World Between Two Worlds” number, in which detained immigrants perform a “Stomp”-style stepping and clapping routine that abruptly ends when a guard takes one of them away. That said, at least the show moves; Lorin Latarro’s choreography animates even the most mundane scenes, say, in a classroom or on a New York City street. (The ensemble members enter and exit via doorways and a balcony platform in David Zinn’s confined set design of oppressively gray walls that transform into various spaces and institutions that may exclude individuals — an apt metaphor.)Yorkey’s clunky lyrics are what ultimately do the songs in; some are attempts to add introspection to a deeply withdrawn protagonist with a wooden disposition. So we’re treated to obvious lines like, “Here I am in a suit at this conference,” or clichés like, “Find the rhythm within,” and, “You join the [drum] circle and it joins you.”Hyde Pierce speak-sings his way through the score, or spastically works himself up into the bravado needed for the nauseatingly cheesy “Better Angels,” which is meant to be a triumphant showstopper. As Tarek, Maksoud gives an earnest performance but never seems to plumb any emotional depths — or vocal ones either. Deslorieux has the strongest voice of the main cast, crooning with delicate rolling r’s for her character’s accent. As Mouna, Antaramian’s voice is inconsistent, and she has a loose grasp on her character’s accent.Maksoud with ensemble members in the musical. The ensemble etches “small but remarkable performance moments, even in the background and during the fleeting transitional numbers,” our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe ensemble, however, often upstages the main cast members, etching small but remarkable performance moments, even in the background and during the fleeting transitional numbers.In one, Katie Terza nearly blows off the walls of the Public with a brief yet transcendent Arabic song, and the professional drummer Takafumi Nikaido (also the production’s djembe coach) could easily steal the entire production.The few attempts at nuance — a comment from Walter showing how he’s also guilty of racial stereotypes, a mention of him as a white savior, and an added back story about Zainab’s abuse-ridden immigration journey — cannot change the story that’s being told or how uncomfortably it sits in our current moment. Even with the additions, the immigrant characters still ultimately function as markers of Walter’s emotional growth and development; they have bits of personality and back stories but can’t stand on their own in a plot without him.So what does one do with a work of art that, by the time of its premiere, has already been outpaced by the moment? How can you contemporize a work whose very conceit — its whole plot, its central perspective — will land like a well-meaning but ignorant cousin’s comment in a conscientious cultural conversation?These questions, of course, are larger than what the Public has on its stage right now. “The Visitor” proves that we can’t always pick up exactly where we left off. Sometimes that’s a good thing.The VisitorThrough Dec. 5 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More