"They're Playing Our Song" - Garbeau's Dinner Theatre

(Left) Katie Murphy


After dinner at Cattleman's this evening, I went with the DMTC crew to see "They're Playing Our Song" at Garbeau's. This Neil Simon/Marvin Hamlisch musical, set in the 1970's, focuses on the romantic relationship between Vernon Gersch (Jerry Lee), an established composer of popular ballads, and Sonia Walsk (Katie Murphy), a budding lyricist. The relationship is examined with the kind of frantic, psychoanalytic, neurotic intensity that Neil Simon (and Woody Allen) are famous for.

In my judgment, Simon's obsessive intensity interferes with the ability of the actors to tell a story. Instead of a tender bud germinating in the springtime of love, the romantic relationship is treated like a hamster on a rotary treadmill in a tight, little cage, travelling in circles. The actors are constrained by the playwright, and thus must find innovative ways to break free. The actors here did an admirable job of releasing the hamster of love.

Neil Simon found fame, of course, for "The Odd Couple": examining the friendship between Oscar and Felix, two very different people. Opposites do attract: in life, in love, and in theater too! Superficial differences aside, the romantic couple here have neuroses that are too similar, so Simon's approach falls flat.

Musically, the decade of the 1970's were a time of transition - denatured jazz, degraded Broadway, plastic pop, and erratic disco combined to create a soundscape of awesome kitsch. Like a talented musical warrior, Marvin Hamlisch should have been able to overcome all these weaknesses, but instead, each genre works to sandbag him: the combination is weaker than the sum of the parts. The pop music sounds like Neil Sedaka and Donny Osmond channeling Elton John. The disco is purely derivative.

So, Lee and Murphy and company worked with energy to overcome the weaknesses. Jerry Lee (who has been making a mark of late in local musical theater circles) sings remarkably well. Katie Murphy (who arrived in Sacramento two years ago from Pepperdine University) is blessed with a dancer's energy, and the two together attack the material with gusto. The script is full of rapid-fire, yet commonplace, dialogue that is a devil to memorize, but Lee and Murphy pull it off almost flawlessly. I remember, in particular, "I am an entity!" The scenic design, by John Coyne, is fine, and the costuming by Eileen Beaver is excellent. And the choreography by Debbie Davis Worth, ably executed by the company (which includes friends Ryan Adame and Celia Green), is sharp and clever. If I understand correctly, Debbie Davis Worth is active in other theater and dance ventures in the El Dorado area. I'd like to see more of her work soon.

After a weak start, Act I ends very well. Two events (a car that won't start; a mistaken rendezvous place) almost succeed at breaking Simon's self-referential navel-gazing. Murphy really flowers here, full of life and fun. It's almost as if the hamster of love is taken off its rotary treadmill and removed from its cage. I wondered if the hamster would be set free in Act II, or put in a radically-different place, like Alaska's Iditarod Sled Race. Alas, in Act II, Simon puts the hamster back into an even more-confining cage. The neurotic edge eventually dissipates into treacle, however. It's enough to make you wonder why anyone would ever want a 'relationship'.

So, what's an actor going to do? Energy and more energy! Lee and Murphy and company do an admirable job with a script that, unfortunately, needed professional couch time back in the 1970's. I'd sure like to see Jerry Lee and Katie Murphy perform again - they are both excellent!