NEW YORK — Recklessly ambitious, bewilderingly epic, the Kurt Weill/Alan Jay Lerner musical Love Life has been forgotten, lost, and periodically resurrected as visionary theater. But is it good? Sometimes.
In the midst of rehearsal in March 2020 when the pandemic hit and canceled it, the New York City Center Encores! production of Love Life finally opened March 26 (for seven performances through March 30) to a packed house that was ready to forgive the show’s weaknesses. For this, thanks go to a smartly revised production and knockout performances by Kate Baldwin and Brian Stokes Mitchell, who both had headed the 2020 cast.
Speaking as someone who has seen two previous productions, this was as good as Love Life can be, and it became oddly thrilling. Where else can you see three of the mid-20th century’s most brilliant minds — composer Weill, lyricist-librettist Lerner, and the original director, Elia Kazan — reaching for something out of their league? But doing so with strong modern parallels, hitting the U.S. in a current point of reckoning with its saga of the ruthless business world claiming precedence over humanity?
The 1948 original, which had a respectable but probably not profitable 252-performance run, must have been extravagant. The program for the almost-fully-staged Encores! production listed a 31-member cast for more than 40 roles. Future theater-makers from Hal Prince to Bob Fosse saw the original at an impressionable age and drew from it for now-classic shows including Company, Cabaret, and Chicago. The main Love Life templates were the social critique of the Orson Welles film The Magnificent Ambersons and Thornton Wilder’s play The Skin of our Teeth, with time-transcending characters who live through centuries untouched by age but not by the catastrophe-prone world around them.
Hosted by demonic magicians, the show has two seemingly everyday people plucked from the audience and transformed onstage into Samuel and Susan Cooper, whose marriage in idyllic post-revolution America starts where most musicals end — the happily-ever-after part — and deteriorates amid the Industrial Revolution, the women’s rights movement, and on into family squabbles about what programs to hear on the radio.
Along the way are traditional Broadway-ish songs and choruses, though the plot is frequently halted by commentary of various sorts. Characters come and go in the spirit of vaudevillian scenes. Weighty matters are discussed with breezy nonchalance. The score — its one breakout song, “Here I’ll Stay,” was a gem in Liza Minnelli’s repertoire — was never recorded (due to a musicians union strike in 1948) until 2025 by Opera North in the UK. One particular song has acquired a cult following: the sometimes-cut, psychologically complicated “Susan’s Dream,” sympathetically describing a woman who wishes she’d never been born. The final scene, a multi-song production number titled “The Love Life Illusion Show,” very much recalls the dream sequences from Weill’s 1941 Broadway masterpiece Lady in the Dark.
But despite Weill’s own distinctive orchestrations (sounding good under conductor Rob Berman), the score lacks a central personality, as can probably be expected in a plot that makes multi-decade leaps from one scene to another. Especially in the early colonial America scenes, the composer seems stylistically stretched thin, giving the show what it needs but sounding perfunctory. Though I loved the show’s boldness in my two previous encounters — live in Philadelphia in 1990 and on a 1987 video from the University of Michigan — the experimental form of heterogeneous songs, scenes, and Brechtian interludes meant that even some of the best music has a vague sense of purpose and fits only obliquely several of the scenes.
An interventionist production was warranted, and this one, masterminded by director Victoria Clark, was a tight, well-edited, smartly conceived, and quite entertaining package. Clark was clearly thinking strategically. A complex faux-madrigal sequence was cut. Also gone was a high-comedy health-club locker room scene that sent up how male machismo had evolved in the world of alienated compartmentalized marriages. (It was cut during the Boston pre-Broadway tour and was perhaps seen by Leonard Bernstein, who did his own version of it four years later in Trouble in Tahiti.) Elsewhere, dialogue was trimmed in some of the long non-musical scenes, and some wonderfully punchy new lines weren’t just piquant but focused dramatic intentions. The production’s one misfire was the Act II “His & Hers: A Divorce Ballet,” in which JoAnn M. Hunter’s otherwise excellent choreography didn’t say much.
The best innovation was replacing the demonic magicians (used as a framing device in many scenes) with the two Cooper children, who are leading their parents on a journey to themselves. “We won’t do anything to you that you haven’t already done to yourselves,” assures one of them. The problem is finding child actors who can pull it off. These two — Christopher Jordan and Andrea Rosa Guzman — were so astonishingly stage savvy that they practically walked off with the show.
Baldwin and Mitchell went far to find the dramatic truth in their long, exhausting roles. Every line-reading felt genuine. Mitchell’s booming singing voice has acquired attractive rough edges: There’s much mileage in those pipes, and he uses it well. Baldwin’s clear, purposeful soprano was a constant joy, ever reminding you of the character’s pre-feminist starting point but detailing her emergence into modern (1948) womanhood.
One marvels to think what other Broadway shows could be rehabilitated by these creators. (Weill died in 1950 at the age of 50 during the run of his last Broadway show, Lost in the Stars.) Twenty-eight years after Love Life, Lerner returned to a decade-hopping historic White House pageant in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with Bernstein. It lasted a week on Broadway. Gore Vidal advised Bernstein, “Take it to the Shrine of the Lourdes because it needs a miracle.” Victoria Clark would be a more resourceful option.
