Blue-Collared

By T.E.Kalem

WORKING

From the book by Studs Terkel Adapted by Stephen Schwartz

More often than not, New York producers operate on an avaricious creed: if at first you do succeed, try it again and again. The current golden format is the confessional musical. It emerged as a shining triumph in A Chorus Line. Between dance numbers, each cast member explains why dancing became a kind of Holy Grail. In Runaways, the street urchins tell pathetic tales of the violent and loveless homes from which they fled.

In Working, we hear something very close to the blue-collar blues, as waitresses, firemen, call girls, mill hands, gas-meter readers, tie salesmen and other assorted sons and daughters of toil tell of the hopes, frustrations and occasional joys of their daily march in the army of labor.

The show's problem is that the characters are not doing their jobs but talking about them. The help they get from Onna White's routine choreography is tangential: who of us dances out work life any way, except dancers? The songs are written by too many hands to possess a distinctive signature, though James Taylor's Millwork with Bobo Lewis is a pensive pent-up lamentation.

Two peppery performances stand out. Matt Landers delivers a rousing soliloquy about how he quit a bank job because it was unreal and stopped being a cop when he began to hate people. As a fireman, he salvaged dignity and purpose in saving lives. Playing a call girl, Patti Lu-Pone displays a languid, undeluded cynicism that stingingly implies that the U.S. may be a nation of hustlers on or off the job.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.