Riverside Theatre rings in the new year with a 1980s party – “Mystic Pizza,” a musical based on the 1988 coming-of-age movie.
The story centers on three young women, two of them sisters, who have graduated from high school and are planning life’s next chapters. All three work at the pizza shop in the title, located in a sleepy Connecticut fishing village.
Kat, the youngest (Alaina Anderson), is considered “the smart one.” She’s been accepted to Yale and works multiple jobs to raise the tuition her partial scholarship doesn’t cover.
One of these jobs is looking in on a vacation home for its out-of-town owners, and that’s where she meets Tim, an architect who is staying there while he renovates a historic property along the coast.
Kat’s sister Daisy (Krystina Alabado) is the pretty one, less focused and satisfied to waitress as she wades around in the town’s shallow dating pool.
Their friend Jo (Deánna Giulietti) completes the trio. The show begins with her at the altar, where she faints dead away during her wedding vows. Fearful of losing herself in a mundane, unfulfilling existence, she vacillates about going through with marriage to her fiancé Bill.
These three main performers are very good, are far as the script lets them go. Their characters have a believable lifelong friendship, and the two sisters’ relationship has the recognizable prickliness of family.
The waters get murky as we head into jukebox territory. It’s a given that audiences like music they’re already familiar with. But that’s not always enough to sustain a full-length musical, especially when it works at odds with storytelling and characterization.
As a result, “Mystic Pizza” plays too much like a mashup between Amy Holden Jones’ sweet and salty screenplay for the movie … and a cruise ship’s 1980s revue. So as long as the setting is a wedding reception or out barhopping, the party songs work. But when things turn serious, a split personality between the story and the good-times pop music makes the gears grind.
Those who love the ’80s music will enjoy the show a lot, as the producers have procured a boatload of the best-known songs from the era. Name a major hit from this time, and it’s probably in the playlist.
Music director Kristin Stowell and orchestrator/arranger Carmel Dean get a splendid sound from the cast and the on-stage band, with lovely vocal harmonies throughout. They mostly focus on what sent recordings to the top of the charts, only occasionally giving a number a new interpretation that deepens its resonance in the story.
Much of the fun of jukebox musicals stems from the audience being in on the joke – hearing how cleverly the writers weave familiar songs into their narrative. This benefits from a lightness of tone not always found in “Mystic Pizza” because the story itself is not inherently funny.
The protagonists contend with romance, sex, hope and yearning, whether it be as a nervous bride, a reputation as the town’s “easy” girl, or a painful affair with an older boss. While gentle humor can be found in these situations, so is poignance and drama as the young women grapple with lifechanging decisions on their road to adulthood.
Too often a character is in serious circumstances and the performer has built to a genuine emotional truth, only to lurch into a song that does little more than remind us what was playing on the radio four decades ago.
It’s hard to take the characters’ problems seriously once we realize they’re just stairsteps to one more radio hit. One actually starts to feel bad for the actors, constrained as they are by a setup that can undermine their performance.
Interestingly, the song that works best is probably the least well known: Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic,” sung as a duet between Kat and Tim as they look out to sea from the balcony of the historic house he’s renovating. It feels specific to the nautical locale of the play, and in an evening awash in generic sentiment, seems to anchor us in the actual thoughts and feelings of the characters.
The most fun matchup of songs to scene comes in the second act. While the employees of the pizzeria court a visiting food critic and await his verdict, the ladies combine “All I Need is a Miracle” and “You Keep Me Hanging On” into a lighthearted prayer that arises naturally and humorously from the situation at hand. (Jennifer Fouché as Leona, the owner of the shop, is a particular delight here.)
The cast and ensemble are all very talented and work proficiently all evening long to sell the songs. Among a terrific supporting cast, James Hindman is fun to watch in a series of roles: as the priest whose reverberating voice makes Jo pass out at the altar; the judgmental father of one of the boyfriends; and especially, the priggish food critic on whose opinion the title pizzeria’s fortunes may rest.
In Sandy Rustin’s adaptation of the movie to the stage, some big moments are lost to the limitations of what can be done on stage. When Daisy sees her boyfriend with another woman and assumes the worst, her revenge – in the movie dumping barrels of fish into his Porsche – is reduced to a literal slap in the face.
A more damaging change is the absence of Tim’s young daughter. In the movie, Tim hires Kat as the child’s babysitter, and the loving bond they forge is in part what attracts him to her. But (presumably to avoid the need to cast a child actor) the musical settles instead for having Kat fall for her boss in a love-at-first-sight contrivance.
This sadly lowers the stakes, as the little girl’s presence brought a lot of heart and a real conflict into Kat’s struggle with her feelings for Tim.
Still, there’s fun to be had, and Riverside offers up its expected top-drawer physical production.
Connor Gallagher’s choreography replays the MTV era with dance moves evoking the 1980s.
Special note to Ms. Giulietti’s “hair-ography” as she swirls her headful of curls about with abandon.
The costumes by Jen Caprio, too, are period precise, and depict the class distinction between the blue collar “townies” and their country club counterparts. And Nate Bertone’s nautically themed set nicely evokes the fishing village milieu, changing as needed from docks to country club to posh home or dive bar, quickly and fluidly.
“Mystic Pizza” runs through Jan. 26 at Riverside Theatre, 3250 Riverside Park Dr., Vero Beach. Tickets are available online at RiversideTheatre.com or by calling the box office at 772-231-6990.
Photos provided
