OFF OFF LOOP THEATER FESTIVAL
North Avenue Productions
Reset in a semirural community in Lake County in the early 1900s, High Fidelity concerns a young widow, Aurora Wentworth, who clings indulgently to the melancholy pleasures of pining for her dead husband until she is shaken out of her sorrow by an abrasive male visitor, Theodore Bompass (rhymes with “rumpus” in one of the libretto’s more irritating couplets). Bompass holds Aurora accountable for a debt owed him by her late husband; she can’t pay; and their argument escalates until Bompass, no gentleman he, challenges Aurora to a duel–and she spunkily accepts the challenge. The first act, which is all that’s presented here, ends with a bang and a blackout, leaving us to wonder who shot whom and where (stay tuned for act two some time in the future).
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Then if you still stay, you’ll suffer Hart failure. Lorenz Hart, that is, who wrote the lyrics and coauthored the script of the 1937 musical Babes in Arms to Richard Rodgers’s tunes. Musical Repertorie Theatre, which reportedly is dedicated to the preservation of classic musical theater, embalms rather than preserves this classic in its intolerably sluggish production. The script (updated to include references to Rodgers and Hammerstein, VistaVision and Todd-AO, Lolita, and other post-1937 phenomena) is by George Oppenheimer, based on the one Rodgers and Hart wrote originally. The story’s basically the same: a group of stagestruck kids get together to put on an original show as a way to fight off the drudgery of forced labor (on a work farm in the original–here the setting’s a stock theater that exploits its young apprentice members). This sketchy plot is the hook on which hang such enduring songs as “Where or When,” “The Lady Is a Tramp” (not used in this production, which is only the show’s first act), “My Funny Valentine” (surely the unattractive, self-hating Hart’s fantasy expression of what he wanted a lover to say to him–“Your looks are laughable / Unphotographable / Yet you’re my favorite work of art”), and the deliciously antiromantic “I Wish I Were in Love Again” (“When love congeals / It soon reveals / The faint aroma of performing seals / The double-crossing of a pair of heels / I wish I were in love again!”).
