Eleanor: An American Love Story
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It’s hard to believe, but there was a time when musicals were sometimes relevant, when composers like Leonard Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, and even George Gershwin used this consummately American art form as a means of social commentary as well as entertainment. Today, though–despite the every-season-or-two aberration–even the musical that attempts to address contemporary issues is still primarily a vehicle for nice costumes and hummable songs, preventing the audience from thinking too long or too hard.
Eleanor: An American Love Story, a tuneful biography of the young Eleanor and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, is a case in point. Severely simplifying the story of a complex American icon, it reduces Eleanor Roosevelt to a few familiar characteristics and predictable rhymes–she’s turned into a generic musical theater heroine whose songs could as easily be sung by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita Peron (or the title character in a possibly forthcoming musical, “Iron Lady: The Musical Life of Maggie Thatcher”).
There are powerful moments in this Marriott’s Lincolnshire Chicago-area premiere that suggest the potential for a dramatic musical treatment. The song that opens the second act–“What Do We Do About Eleanor?”–is moving and almost hypnotically reserved, as the Roosevelt family and confidants discuss keeping the couple together. And the scenes in which Eleanor cares for her polio-stricken husband are filled with pathos. But these points are few, crammed in among too many scenes of FDR’s stuck-up, overprotective mother kvetching about Eleanor’s improprieties and too many beautifully sung but entirely unmemorable songs chock-full of homilies (“The way to receive is to give,” Eleanor sings). Glaringly representative of this musical’s lack of a political voice is one scene near the climax in which Howe (played with show-stopping Stubby Kaye moxie by Joel Hatch) coaches Eleanor on political speaking. He shows no concern for her ideas, however, but focuses on whether she can have “fun,” also the title of the song. Eleanor the Frump must loosen up, let her hair down and have a good time.
