‘The Life’ Overview: Turning Extra Than a Few New Tips

In case you’ve forgotten the premise behind Reaganomics, the musical “The Life” gives a primer proper earlier than an enormous quantity on the high of Act 2: It was based mostly on “the proposition that taxes on companies ought to be decreased as a method to stimulate enterprise funding within the quick time period and profit society at massive in the long run.”

And 5, six, seven, eight!

Not solely is that this dialogue leaden — particularly coming from a younger pimp — however it isn’t in “The Life” as we all know it: The musical that opened final night time as part of New York City Center’s Encores! series has been drastically reconfigured from the one which premiered on Broadway in 1997.

Again then, the composer Cy Coleman and the lyricist Ira Gasman conceived “Mr. Greed” as a cynical showstopper — very a lot in a Kander and Ebb vein — through which ’80s-era pimps and rip-off artists taking part in three-card monte clarify that their greatest ally is the cupidity that blinds marks to their very own foolishness.

Now Billy Porter — who tailored Coleman, Gasman and David Newman’s guide, and directed this manufacturing — places Trump and Reagan masks on the ensemble members and has them sing and dance their denunciation of an ideology. The quantity is of a stylistic and aesthetic piece with Porter’s take on the show, which emphasizes systemic oppression to the detriment of particular person characterizations. Whether or not it’s of a bit with “The Life,” nicely, that’s one thing else.

There are a lot of adjustments to the guide, however essentially the most structurally consequential is the choice to border the story as a flashback narrated, many years after the occasions, by the shady operator Jojo. He’s now, he informs us, a profitable Los Angeles publicity agent, however within the ’80s he was an entrepreneurial minnow in Occasions Sq. at its seediest. (Anita Yavich’s costumes are colorfully interval, even when they really feel extra anchored in a Seventies disco-funk vibe than within the colder Reaganite decade.)

Previous Jojo (Destan Owens) acts as our information to the characters, who embody the prostitutes Queen (Alexandra Gray) and Sonja (Ledisi), in addition to their protectors and abusers, just like the Vietnam veteran Fleetwood (Ken Robinson) and the brutal pimp Memphis (Antwayn Hopper).

Jojo additionally usually feedback on the motion, usually casting a remorseful eye on the habits of his youthful self, portrayed by Mykal Kilgore. (Owens performs different characters, too, which results in a reasonably complicated dialog with Queen that makes you surprise if Porter has scrambled the space-time continuum, on high of all the things else.)

Sadly the memory-musical format solely takes us out of the plot and, most crucially, the emotional affect. Each time we get absorbed within the Nineteen Eighties goings-on, the older Jojo pops up with explainy again tales, ham-handed editorializing and numbing lectures. The unique present allow us to progressively uncover the characters’ distinct personalities by actions, phrases and songs; now they’re archetypal pawns in an op-ed. One can agree with a message and nonetheless discover its kind missing.

Adjustments abound all through the night. Shifting Sonja’s “The Oldest Career” to the second act transforms it into an 11 o’clock quantity for Ledisi, a Grammy-winning singer who runs with it and gives the present’s most thrilling second.

Others can really feel dutiful. The unique setup for the empowerment anthem “My Physique,” which the corporate memorably performed at the 1997 Tony Awards (“The Life” had 12 nominations), was the working girls’s reply to a gaggle of sanctimonious Bible-thumpers.

Now the tune follows a go to to a Midtown clinic “based by a gaggle of ex-hookers who discovered some medical of us to accomplice with who truly lived by that Hippocratic oath state of affairs,” as Previous Jojo explains. There Sonja will get handled for throat thrush and Queen, who’s now transgender, receives injections. The segue into “My Physique” feels each literal and abrupt, and we miss the antagonists.

In a recent interview with The New York Times, Porter stated he thought that “the comedy was doing the storytelling a disservice” within the authentic manufacturing, which was hatched by white creators and dealt largely with Black characters. However whereas he has added loads of again tales, particularly for Fleetwood, Sonja and Queen, his model additionally options fairly just a few new quips in addition to some unlucky broad humorous enterprise.

Younger Jojo is unhealthy sufficient in that respect, however Memphis suffers essentially the most. As portrayed by a Tony-winning Chuck Cooper in 1997, his calm amplified his menace: This was a Luciferian scary man. Now Memphis is a Blaxploitation cartoon who could be distractingly flamboyant, as when he hijacks one among Queen’s key scenes by preening barechested. Hopper, who sings in a velvety bass-baritone, has such uncanny abs that for a second I puzzled whether or not the present was someway utilizing dwell CGI.

Including to the meta enterprise, Memphis can also be liable to winky fourth-wall-breaking asides, as when he complimented the visitor conductor James Sampliner on his preparations.

As a result of these are new, too. Coleman, equally comfy delivering pop earworms in “Candy Charity” and canny operetta pastiches in “On the Twentieth Century,” was one among Broadway’s most wonderful melody writers, and “The Life,” orchestrated by Don Sebesky and Harold Wheeler (of “The Wiz” and “Dreamgirls” fame), was an fascinating melding of brassy impulses rooted in a musical-theater idiom. However Sampliner’s formulaic R&B- and funk-inflected orchestrations and preparations undermine the rating’s idiosyncrasies.

For higher or for worse — largely for worse right here — Regietheater, the German observe of radically reinterpreting a play, musical or opera, has come to Encores. Whether or not that method belongs on this sequence — which debuted in 1994 to supply temporary runs of underappreciated musicals in live performance model and has historically been about reconstruction reasonably than deconstruction — is an open query.

Rethinks could be welcome, even needed in musical theater — Daniel Fish’s production of “Oklahoma!,” now touring the nation, is one particularly profitable instance.

The historically archival-minded Encores has broadened its mission assertion to incorporate that the artists are “reclaiming work for our time by their very own private lens.” It’s clear that the sequence is shifting into a brand new part, however for many people longtime followers, it’s additionally slightly unhappy to lose such a novel showcase.

The Life
By means of March 20 at New York Metropolis Middle, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Operating time: 2 hours 45 minutes.