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Peer Reviews Baby
Baby is a cute musical composed of brief, vignette-like scenes that illustrate the joy, frustration and heartbreak of pregnancy. After a brief prologue charting the journey a sperm makes to join the egg, we are introduced to three couples: Lizzie and Danny are college students living in a basement apartment, Arlene and Alan are middle-class, forty-something and the parents of two grown daughters, and Pam and Nick are a young athletic couple who have been married a few years. All three couples find out they are expectant parents. Although this is initially accepted as good news by all, in the course of the play many questions and complications arise.
The book by Sybille Pearson is funny and insightful, but it is also a slight piece of work. Some gravity is given to the characters as things progress, but the script never digs too deep. The music and lyrics by David Shire and Richard Maltby, Jr. are more successful, but some of the songs, while pleasant enough, are not truly memorable The best exceptions are group efforts such as "I Want It All," sung by the three expectant mothers in the obstetrician's waiting room, "Fatherhood Blues," delivered by the fathers-to-be and their softball buddies, and the highlight of the evening, a very funny lament about the attentions pregnant women receive from other women, entitled "The Ladies Singing Their Song," that brought most of the female cast members together. If the test of a good musical is whether you are humming the songs in your head as you leave the theater, these three make their mark. The cast was uniformly excellent, bringing good comic timing to their dialogue and a good sense of showmanship to their musical numbers, but it is the work of the three mothers-to-be that truly distinguishes this production. Katie Bowles as Lizzie and Melissa Shepherd as Pam both brought high energy and bright talent to the stage in ample supply as the two younger women, while Colette Delaney Barney provided a nice rueful quality to the older, more experienced Arlene. All were in fine voice. The set design, in which practically everything was constructed of oversize alphabet blocks, was clever, bright and fun, and the costumes by Jeremy J. Moon displayed a careful eye for detail that reinforced character and theme. The first act seemed to last longer than necessary, a problem that might owe more to the structure of the script than the pacing, and there were technical problems with the sound system the night I attended. Fortunately, the cast were vocally strong enough to overcome the problem, and most of the songs came across in fine fashion without benefit of microphones.
Baby Posted May 11, 2008
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