“I saw it in ’77,” one theatergoer said to his companion as they entered the Vivian Beaumont Theater to see the 2023 revival of “Camelot,” the 1960 Lerner and Loewe musical based on T.H. White’s Arthurian tales. “It’s very different,” was the snappy reply… and indeed it is.
While I’m far too young to have seen the original Broadway production, I did see both revivals, in 1980 at Lincoln Center with Richard Burton starring as Arthur and in 1993 at the Gershwin with Robert Goulet in that role.
In addition, I was the musical director for a clever mash-up of the book “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” in fourth grade using much of the score of “Camelot,” during which I got to know the music intimately.
To review the plot rather quickly, Camelot is perhaps the “most congenial spot for happy ever-aftering” in the civilized world. A beautiful French princess (Phillipa Soo) on her way to a forced marriage to the king of England (Andrew Burnap) is… swept off her feet by an unassuming and self-effacing… king of England, who is only king by virtue of having pulled the mythical sword Excalibur out of a stone into which it had been magically affixed. Meanwhile, the new queen falls in love with His Majesty’s most senior knight, Lancelot de Lac (Jordan Donica).
“And there’s a legal limit to the snow here / In Camelot.”
Per the Arthurian legend, there would be a magician, Merlyn, and the lady of the lake, a beautiful sea nymph.
I continue to argue that “Camelot” has a superb score by Frederick Loewe and songs by Alan Jay Lerner that range from lush romanticism (“If Ever I Would Leave You”) to witty and self-effacing (“I Wonder What the King is Doing Tonight,” which is sung by the king himself) to the narcissistic “(C’est Moi,” sung by Lancelot) Indeed, Lerner’s lyrics never fail to dazzle theatergoers with clever wit and virtuosity.
The only problem is the book, which attempts to cover romance, politics, swordplay, and sorcery in just under three hours. This is not a new problem: New York Times critic Howard Taubman pointed this out after the show’s opening, commenting in his opening-night review that, “[U]nfortunately, ‘Camelot’ is weighed down by the burden of its book.”
The current revival, which opened this month, is directed by Barlett Scherr rewritten by Aaron Sorkin of “West Wing” fame and his collaborator in the critically acclaimed revival of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
Andrew Burnap as Arthur, Philppa Soo as Guinevere, and Jordan Donica as Lancelot de Lac
“Camelot” is one of the last great musicals of Broadway’s “Golden Age,” with the requisite 27-person cast and a 30-piece orchestra and songs that harken to an unattainable but perfect past.
To Sorkin, Camelot (the place) is less magical and more enlightened. Sorkin set the story “on the eve of the Enlightenment” even though the chronology gets lost as the piece unfolds. “The Middle Ages won’d end by itself,” he says, commenting on the need for science and rational thinking. He removes all references to magic (the sword Excalibur was removed not by magic but because it had been loosened by 10,000 men who had preceded Arthur’s attempt to pull it out of the rock) and adds in a dash of science.
Missing out of necessity due to Sorkin’s changes is one of my favorite songs, “Follow Me” (which was sung by Mary Sue Berry as Nimue in the original production) which would have followed “I Loved Your Once in Silence” and preceded “Guinevere.” Nimue, a beautiful water nymph, came to draw Merlyn into her cave for an eternal sleep. Instead, Merlyn dies by slowly walking off stage.
Arthur wants to change England’s culture from one of violence to one of justice, which is his rationale for creating the round table and then convening his knights, while Sorkin bravely attempts to make clear the evolution of belief in magic to belief in science. Merlyn (a superb Dakin Matthews) is no longer a wizard but a sage and Morgan Le Fay (Marilee Talkington) is a chemist of some unspecified variety who is the also the mother of Mordred (played cheekily by Taylor Trensch), Arthur’s bastard child.
The queen becomes the king’s partner in writing his treatises, the “simple folk” are invited to the Maying celebration alongside royalty and knights, and knights must be educated and read Plato. Perhaps in a nod to happy ever-aftering, Guinevere’s and Arthur’s love remains true. Indeed, the tryst with Lancelot is a bit pro forma and the staging could be out of a 1980s porno, i.e., cold and mechanical.
Despite the nod to the modern age, the woman – in this case the queen – is still “sentenced to the flame” for adultery, and in “Fie on Goodness,” the knights of the roundtable bemoan the loss of their freedom to rape and pillage the village: “And when wooin’ called in Scotland / we’d grab any passing maid!”
The sword fight, choreographed by fight director B.H. Barry, is brilliant and awakened some members of the audience out of their eternal sleep.
The current production’s greatest obstacle is that it lacks songs to back up Sorkin’s nods to modernity. What makes Camelot maintain its appeal is the strong tie between Lerner’s lyrics and the plot. Absent that, one must overlook some of the gaps, and the stunning costumes by Jennifer Moeller do just that. Perhaps emblematic of the problems of this version is that Michael Yeargan’s set lacks a roundtable, not to mention a castle to put one in. Instead, there’s striking set features a two-dimensional tree, snow, arches, and screens.
If you close your eyes, which I did do many times in the course of the evening, what you hear from the pit under the baton of Will Curry, namely 30 musicians playing the original orchestrations by Robert Russell Bennett and Philip J. Lang, the purity of the sound transports you to the place where “July and August cannot be too hot” and “the climate must be perfect through the year.”
That place is, of course, “Camelot” and the song’s significance as a favorite of President John F. Kennedy, something confirmed shortly after his assassination by Jacquelyn Kennedy in an interview by Theodore H. White for Life magazine.
“The lines he loved to hear,” said Mrs. Kennedy in the Life article, “were, [D]on’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.”
THE DETAILS
Camelot
Vivian Beaumont Theatre
50 Lincoln Center Plaza
New York, N.Y. 10023
Runtime : 2 hours and 50 minutes
https://camelotbway.com/
(Photos: Accura Media Group)
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