Take Flight

The McCarter Theatre' season closes with Take Flight, an original musical that parallels the stories of a trio of pioneers of aviation: the Wright Brothers, Charles Lindbergh, and Amelia Earhart. For all of the hard work on stage and the brilliant visuals by director Sam Buntrock and his scenic design team, the result plays like a history pageant, with forgettable music and uninspired lyrics.

As I watched the show and realized I wasn't enjoying myself, I wondered what makes a good musical, or why Take Flight is not a good one. I think it comes down to the songs. As I sit here typing this now I can't remember one melody, and without looking at the program there are few titles I can remember. None of the songs here could exist outside the world of the production, which is a direct contrast to the glory days of Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Loewe, or even rock musicals like Hair or Godspell. All of the songs in Take Flight further the plot, laying out exposition and reeling off facts that are evidence the writers did a lot of research--too much research. If the History Channel made musicals, they might come up with Take Flight.

Almost all of the good things I took away from the show were for the eye. It opens with Wilbur and Orville Wright, in derbies and waistcoats, like Vladimir and Estragon, standing alone together on the beach at Kitty Hawk, holding opposite ends of a trunk. Their story tells us that these two modest bicycle salesman from Dayton adjusted the accepted mathematics and managed to get a flying machine into the air. The brothers are depicted somewhat in comic archetypes by Stanton Nash and Benjamin Schrader--Wilbur is the frustrated hothead, while Orville is the more patient, less cerebral brother. He also is given the unforgivable line, "We can't be wrong, we're the Wright brothers."

Lindbergh, played by Claybourne Elder, gets a warts and all treatment (although there is only one line, spoken by Earhart, about his Nazi sympathizing). To put it simply, the guy was a tool, and we see him explaining away his ass-hattery as having trouble relating to people (he refuses to shake hands with people, too). He was a mail-plane pilot who entered a contest to be the first to fly non-stop across the Atlantic, and defied common sense by wanting to do it alone (although this would help because he could make up the weight in fuel). As with Jimmy Stewart in The Spirit of St. Louis, the act of a man flying by himself across a vast body of water lacks inherent drama, so instead we get Lindbergh hallucinating his past, visited by the plane's designer and his first boss when he was flying stunts.

Earhart, sassily played by Jenn Colella, earns fame by being the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, first as a passenger, then as a pilot. She is supported by a publisher, George Putnam, who becomes her husband (to her chagrin--she only marries him so he'll let her fly). Putnam is played by Michael Cumpsty, who I've seen many a time, mostly in New York Shakespeare productions. He looks disturbingly here like football analyst Mel Kiper Jr.

The three stories weave in and out, with all of the them coming together for the finale. I wasn't sure what we were to take away from all this--maybe a scene at the end with a modern person settling into his seat for a New York to Paris trip without worrying about plunging into the ocean, and saying, "Boy, am I grateful for those who made this possible!" Otherwise it's just corny history backed by listless music. The composer is well-known music scorer David Shire, the lyrics by Richard Maltby Jr. and the book by John Weidman, but they've all done better work elsewhere.