The Golden Apple
In Not Since Carrie, his chronicle of Broadway’s legendary flops, Ken Mandelbaum calls The Golden Apple “perhaps the most neglected masterwork of the American musical theatre.” He’s only half right. Jerome Moross and John Latouche’s musical comedy/folk opera, which humorously resets Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey to 1900s America, is no masterpiece. But it is surely neglected. A critical success in its 1954 off-Broadway premiere, the show fared poorly when transferred to Broadway later that year. Since then it’s been mounted only a handful of times, and the current revival at Northwestern University’s Cahn Auditorium (which wraps up this weekend) is reportedly the first to use Moross’s full orchestrations.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Latouche’s entirely sung libretto relocates the ancient Greek legend to fictional Angel’s Roost in Washington, a state known for its towering peaks–including a real Mount Olympus–and its golden apples. Helen is the stereotypical farmer’s daughter of every traveling-salesman joke you’ve ever heard; married to sheriff Menelaus, she runs away with Paris, who arrives via hot-air balloon to peddle his “Paris Notions.” Paris judges not a beauty contest but a bake-off between Lovey Mars (Aphrodite), the town spinster Miss Minerva, and the mayor’s wife Mrs. Juniper (a conflation of Jupiter and Juno). Ulysses, a Rough Rider just back from the Spanish-American War, is deputized by Menelaus to bring Helen home: it’s “the principle” of the thing, and besides, Helen and Paris took the china and bric-a-brac with them. Accompanied by his comrades Achilles, Patroclus, Ajax, etc, Ulysses heads off for the city of Rhododendron, “rescuing” Helen and wrecking the town.
If The Golden Apple has a single stylistic hallmark, it’s one that inhibits rather than broadens its potential: Moross has set virtually every syllable of Latouche’s text to a separate musical note, without an instance that I can recall of the melisma that opera composers use to make their libretti more expressive and to show off the singers’ voices. The result is briskly paced–The Golden Apple is never boring–but ultimately monotonous. Though the principal characters are given different musical styles to convey their personalities, their songs tend to sound very similar–very much in the patter tradition of the music hall. Except for the sultry “Lazy Afternoon,” these songs really require a highly trained, limber-lipped articulation–and if people can’t sing show tunes to themselves, they’re probably not going to remember them.
