Paradise Found
I’m with Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream on this one: “I am amazed, and know not what to say.” Paradise Found is a bizarrely dreadful musical about the Shah of Persia trying to kickstart his failing libido on a trip to Vienna at the turn of the last century.
The music is finely textured throughout, but is curiously bereft of tunes you might recognise, apart from the good old “Blue Danube”, but even there a sort of self-censoring restraint – not good taste, surely – prevents the expression of rapture or delight.
For a show that supposedly celebrates the restoration of sexual potency, the proceedings are inappropriately limp and joyless. This is partly because John McMartin, a Broadway veteran of notable vintage, can’t really stir any interest in the plight of a dirty-minded old party who catches a glimpse of Shangri-La in the shape of his Viennese hostess, the Austro-Hungarian Empress, or Mizzi as she’s known in the trade.
Mizzi (a lithe and lissom enchantress in Kate Baldwin’s performance) is married to a troubled baron, sung with baritonal splendour by Shuler Hensley – still best known for his Jud Fry in Trevor Nunn’s National Theatre Oklahoma! – who is caught on the horns of a dilemma.
Should he pimp for his wife, or tell his guest to go packing? It’s not the greatest crisis of all time, and it’s not remotely funny, though Mandy Patinkin gawps and squawks on the sidelines as if it were. In truth, much of the action is virtually incomprehensible in the slovenly adaptation by playwright Richard Nelson – the source is a novel by Joseph Roth, The Tale of the 1002nd Night – and gormless lyrics of Elizabeth McHugh.
Everything else in the presentation is top notch: wigs, costumes, the invisible band under Charles Prince’s musical direction, and the severely expressive lighting design by Howell Binkley. But I’m at a loss to understand why anyone thought the musical worth doing in the first place, and I doubt if it will add much lustre to the Menier legend.
