Stage

Folk Medicine

Appleseed Productions salutes the music of Harry Chapin with Lies & Legends

Balladeer Harry Chapin might have suffered an untimely death more than 22 years ago, the victim of a July 1981 auto accident at age 38, but the folks at Appleseed Productions have been the keepers of his flame on the local scene. They're reviving the revue based on his songs, Lies & Legends: The Musical Stories of Harry Chapin, with three members of the original cast from the 1995 mounting.

Although a child of privilege and once an architecture student at Cornell, Chapin was an artist with a keenly developed social conscience. He helped establish the Hungerthon and threw much of his energy into helping the poor and dispossessed; Chapin's late-1970s benefit concerts at downtown Syracuse's Landmark Theatre also helped save the former Loew's State movie palace from the wrecking ball. Like painter Edward Hopper, he had an eye for lonely, disappointed people. Like novelist Richard Ford, his favorite emotions seem to be regret and anxiety. As a celebrator of the lives of ordinary working people, he's a bit like a latter-day Woody Guthrie, but with an existential streak.

Chapin did not, however, write show music. He is theatrical, as director Linda Lance points out, because he strove for a community of shared emotion, and all his lyrics contain narrative. Five singers, known successively as the Father Figure (Mark Wright), the Romantic Young Man (Eric Feldstein), the Dreamgirl (Mary Kate Migdal), the Mother Figure (Kelley Loen-Witter), and the Comic Guy (Robert Steingraber), try to give different voices to different numbers. But there's no escaping that Chapin's feelings tend to run along the same lines. Unlike musical revues such as Jerry's Girls based on Jerry Herman or Side By Side By Sondheim, Lies & Legends lacks the peaks and valleys that build to a dialectic.

The better-known songs in the show sell themselves, and are distributed evenly through the 26-item agenda. They include "Taxi," "Old College Avenue," "W.O.L.D.," "Cat's in the Cradle," "Dogtown" and the finale, "You Are the Only Song/Circle," at which point the cast comes out to the audience and invites them to join in with the lines, "All my life's a circle, I can't tell you why."

Shaping the music is another matter. Director Lance, who also helmed the first Appleseed version eight years ago, somehow allows Kent Bradshaw's musical direction to drown out the lyrics, especially the percussion. Either that or she did not attend to singers' miking; too many of Chapin's tender mercies do not even make it to the prime seats that critics get in the otherwise packed house at the Atonement Lutheran Church stage. Unaccountably, Lance puts some of the action far up on Scott Hoehn's bare stage. Michael Hotaling's generally harsh lighting rarely allows for much sense of intimacy, with the exception of "Better Place to Be."

Returning from the 1995 cast, Eric Feldstein snags the best-known number in the show, "Taxi," and makes it his own. His clear baritone seems to be at the center of Lies & Legends, with the resigned admission of disappointment without bitterness: "She was going to be an actress/ I was going to learn to fly." Without ever mimicking the songwriter, his voice is closest to Chapin's as it survives on recordings.

Feldstein also teams well with Mary Kate Migdal for "Mail Order Annie," a mini-drama about the way lonely people hooked up on the North Dakota frontier. Later, Migdal leads Feldstein in the duet "Dreams Go By." Her best solo is "Winter Song," evoking the style of a 1950s crooner.

Known as a passionate song-belter in other productions, Kelley Loen-Witter is strangely muted and underused here. Her best numbers are "Dogtown," about the poverty and hardship accompanying the over-glamorized whaling industry, "Shooting Star," and her half of the duet with Mark Wright, "A Better Place to Be."

As Herod in Jesus Christ Superstar and the Ghost of Christmas Present in A Dickens of a Christmas at Salt City Center, Robert Steingraber is one of the best-known performers in town. Surprisingly hoarse and listless here, he shows the usual fire only in "Bananas," the one genuinely comic number in Lies & Legends. And returned from the original cast, Mark Wright, now an executive with the Cultural Resources Council, never overcomes problems with diction and projection.

Nevertheless, the spirit of compassionate songster Harry Chapin is still revered at Appleseed Productions. Audience response supports the claim that Lies & Legends has been brought back by popular demand.

This production runs through Sunday, Jan. 18. See Times Table for information.