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05/25/2017 12:01 AMWhat constitutes a satisfying life? Doing what you love, sticking to your principles, providing for your family, enjoying financial success? Can you have it all? How do you find a balance?
These are the questions posed, and answered, in The Most Beautiful Room in New York, a new musical debuting at Long Wharf Theatre.
The play could be about any creative person’s life—musician, writer, artist—but it’s about a chef struggling to keep alive both his small restaurant and commitment to beautifully prepared and presented meals, as Manhattan rents escalate and food consumption becomes more and more profit-driven.
This is the first musical for the stage written by Adam Gopnik, long-time staff writer for The New Yorker, which he developed in collaboration with composer David Shire. Gordon Edelstein, Long Wharf’s artistic director, directs the splendid production with an eye for every detail.
The Most Beautiful Room... is visually stunning, from the nostalgic backdrop of the city and its ever-changing lighting to the farmer’s market overflowing with fresh fruit and vegetables to the charming interior of the café with its well-stocked bar and beautifully equipped kitchen—thanks to set designer Michael Yeargan and lighting by Christopher Akerlind.
Gopnik’s witty and heartfelt lyrics carry the storyline complimented by Shire’s melodic music score. You probably haven’t heard these songs before, but you’ll feel moved by many of them.
The story centers on David (Matt Bogart) and his wife Claire (Anastasia Barzee) and their two children: Bix (Tyler Jones) and younger sister Kate (Sawyer Niehaus). Hardworking, but happy, the couple has been together for 20 years, raising a family while building a restaurant on David’s standards of “real food for real people,” connecting with the neighborhood and supporting the local Farmers Market, run by Phoebe (Darlesia Cearcy) and her partner Gloria (Danielle Ferland), loyal friends to David and Claire.
In a heartwarming scene, father and daughter, David and Kate, sing the optimistic theme song “The Most Beautiful Room...” but soon after, everything changes when David is informed that the rent is going up to $35,000 a month—seven times what they’ve been paying.
Desperate to find a way to stay in their Union Square location, David approaches Sergio (Constantine Maroulis), his past partner, to buy back into the restaurant, despite Claire’s warnings that he’s “a snake and a scorpion.” The set up is obvious—we know this is not going to work out well.
Sergio is the antithesis of David. He doesn’t care about food or people—only fame and fortune, which he makes on book tours, TV appearances, and putting his name on pasta sauces and a chain of sports bars. He represents today’s celebrity chef fixation.
Maroulis is thoroughly unlikable as his role demands, although he looks more like a skinny rock star than one would envision a food star—but maybe that’s part of the joke.
It would be nice, though, to see more humanity, emotion, in Sergio’s broadly drawn character. Even when he expresses his feelings toward Claire (it turns out they’d spent one weekend together in New Jersey, before she met David, expressed in their duet, “Doo Wop Motel”), he sees her as a conquest—he gets what he wants.
Bogart is well-suited as David, the tragic hero on a slow slide into cynicism and despair, watching his neighborhood restaurant transform into a pretentious, personality-less establishment for those who must be seen in the right places, and “love to hate to wait on line.” But he’s too stubborn to make any compromises.
Barzee captures Claire’s frustrations and fears as she tries to keep herself, her husband, and family from falling apart.
The couple harmonizes beautifully on the upbeat “Your Table Will Always Be Waiting” and the poignant, “I See Claire/I Hear David.”
Sergio’s distasteful entourage includes Gabe (Allan Washington), the money-obsessed CEO of Sergio’s brand, and Natasha (Anne Horak), the requisite gorgeous tall blonde with a Russian accent, who maps out Sergio’s daily calendar.
It may be a supporting role, but best performance goes to Mark Nelson as Carlo, owner of Carlo’s Anarchist Pizza, a little dive in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. Nelson is a laugh a minute and a break from some of the melodrama of the plot as David dives into depression, remarking that pizza was the food of the people before Papa Dominoes; extra cheese is bourgeois, extra garlic is proletarian; and Starbucks has destroyed the latte by nailing it to a Styrofoam cross.
Like David, Carlo’s stubborn refusal to change will lead to his downfall, except that his delightful daughter Anna (Krystina Alabado) gently guides him into the 20th century by making green pizzas with Bix, her new boyfriend, and delivering them by Uber.
Anna and Bix sing the awkward, “So, Like Maybe” before their first date and the tender and innocent “What do We Do Now?” after their first sexual encounter.
His life in ruins, David walks all the way across the Brooklyn Bridge to get some advice from the no-B.S. Carlo. He learns, “If you can’t have the pizza, savor the slice,” and ends up simplifying and downsizing his dream. All does end up happily ever after, but I’ll refrain from giving away the feel-good surprise ending.
The play runs more than 2 ½ hours including intermission, but feels shorter as it keeps the audience interested and engaged.
The Most Beautiful Room in New York is on stage through Sunday, May 28 at Long Wharf Theatre, 222 Sargent Drive, New Haven. Tickets are available at the box office, 203-787-4282, or online at www.longwharf.org.