Older son Miles, stuck at 21, has married a civilian, not understanding that he would thereby live to see his wife and child die. As a result, the permanently fortyish parents, Mae and Angus, are stuck in an affectionate but endless marital rut he doesn’t just snore but snores forever. This blessing turned out to be, in part, a curse, exempting them from the natural cycle of decay but also from the recompense of joy. That’s a shame, because the tale itself, set in the late 1800s, is promising enough: Winnie, on the lam from her stultifying home, discovers a family, the Tucks, who many decades earlier drank from a hidden forest spring that gave them eternal life. Instead of dusting its tale with sprightly wit, Babbitt nearly drowns it in sticky, honeyed prose. To begin with, that novel, by Natalie Babbitt, is a poor cousin to the classic “magic” fictions of Edward Eager, E. Those nostalgic for their seventh-grade enthusiasms may love it I found it to be a musical for the child in someone else. But whether the work of so many talented people in effecting the adaptation has added anything of value beyond that one year is another matter this is, almost until the end, a ruthlessly by-the-book treatment of a high-concept, low-wattage fairy tale.
So perhaps we should be grateful that Winnie, the heroine of the 1975 “young adult” fantasy novel Tuck Everlasting, has been bumped up from 10 to 11 for the musical adaptation that just opened on Broadway: She is that much more bearable. The age of a show’s protagonist often provides a clue to the age of the audience the show is pitched to: Patrick in American Psycho is 27 Jenna in Waitress is “in her thirties” the character Frank Langella plays in The Father is 80 going on dead. From Tuck Everlasting, at the Broadhurst.
0 kommentar(er)
