‘Love Life’
City Center

‘Love Life’
The Original Cast Album
Capriccio Records

As a 17-year-old in 1947, Stephen Sondheim had one of his first jobs in the theater: He worked as a “go-fer” — an entry-level production assistant — on Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s third show, “Allegro.” This was a highly experimental presentation, and it was the least successful of that golden team’s works so far. Yet it profoundly inspired the young Sondheim, to the point where it’s been observed that he spent the rest of his career trying to correct the mistakes of “Allegro.”

A year later, Alan Jay Lerner and Kurt Weill gave us another innovative and unconventional work of musical theater, “Love Life.”  This was possibly even more avant-garde than “Allegro,” and certainly it was less successful: Although it ran for seven months and 252 performances — not exactly a flop by contemporaneous standards — there was no national tour, no original cast album, no revivals, no movie or TV adaptations.

Over the next 75 years the sole significant production of “Love Life” was mounted in the U.K., in 1995 by Leeds-based Opera North; it was broadcast over the BBC and made its way into the hands of hardcore theater nerds.  

Now, nearly 80 years after the sole Broadway production, “Love Life” is back in two distinct flavors: Opera North has mounted a new production, thankfully again heard over the BBC, and this time a cast album is available shortly as a CD package from Capriccio Records. There also is a new City Center Encores! production; originally announced for spring 2020, it was pushed back five years by the pandemic. 

The Opera North recording comes as close as possible to the original 1948 script, while the Encores! edition has the book sharpened and tightened by Joe Keenan and director Victoria Clark.

We already knew that “Love Life” was worthy of a place alongside “Allegro” and Weill’s 1941 “Lady in the Dark” as early and innovative examples of something we had no name for at the time but has since become known as the “concept musical.”  

Here’s the “Love Life” concept briefly: In a cavalcade of 150 years of American life, we travel with a single family starting from the early post-revolution era and running through the dawn of the atomic age. The same husband, wife, and two children are presented in six different eras — as if they could have lived all this time without aging. In between the scenes, we are given what audiences of the time would have recognized as “vaudeville” acts — dance teams, magicians, acrobats, barbershop quartets — that comment on the characters and the dramatic action.

Like “Allegro,” there’s no question that “Love Life” was far more influential in the long run than it was commercially viable in early days. Certainly, the team of John Kander and Fred Ebb — who wouldn’t meet until about a decade after “Love Life” had its premiere — took its lessons to heart. They came up with their own variations on this idea for two of their most successful works, “Cabaret” (1966) and “Chicago” (1975).

Still, it wouldn’t be correct to say that Mr. Kander or anyone else was obsessed with fixing the mistakes of “Love Life.” It’s far from a perfect show, but it still seems to be exactly what Lerner and Weill intended: a wry commentary on American life.  

As presented in “Love Life,” the American dream is that a couple can live together peacefully and adapt to changing times — there’s little mention of democracy or social justice issues like racial equality and religious freedom; no one adapts the Bill of Rights into a production number. Yet there is a sequence devoted to female suffrage, which one suspects was probably played more for laughs in 1948. How do women advocate for voting rights in a Broadway musical? They sing and dance, of course.

In the Leeds recording, the two leads are Stephanie Corley as Susan Cooper and Quirijn de Lang as Sam. At Encores!, one Broadway’s all-time major baritones, Brian Stokes Mitchell, is perfect in the main role. Ditto for Kate Baldwin as his spouse, not least because she bears a coincidental resemblance to the infinitely perky Nanette Fabray, who won a Tony for the role in 1949.

The two Encores! kids, Christopher Jordan and Andrea Rosa Guzman, are also practically perfect, and part of the revisions included enlarging their roles. For instance, here the juveniles do the Palace Theater-style magic act that opens the whole shebang, whereas in the original this was a separate character played by Jay Marshall. Mr. Keenan and Ms. Clark made other trims, such as deleting a madrigal that originally opened the second half. 

As a musical entertainment, “Love Life” is thoroughly diverting; the songs are amongst Weill and Lerner’s best, and they surely would have reunited had the composer not died less than a year after “Love Life” closed. “Green Up Time” has been heard since, while “Here I’ll Stay” has become the major standard from the show. “I Remember It Well” was reworked by Lerner and Frederick Loewe 10 years later into a rather different song in “Gigi.”  

Even the circus-style incidental waltz music that accompanies the vaudeville turns is memorable, as is a comedy waltz sung by the kinder titled “Mother’s Getting Nervous.” The piece has two epic dance sequences, freshly choreographed for Encores! by Joann M. Hunter, including a climactic “His & Hers, a Divorce Ballet” in Part Two.

As fun as it is along the way, it’s harder to ascertain what Lerner, in particular, and Weill are trying to tell us: They show that American domestic life gets more complicated in parallel to the economy ratcheting upward. As Samuel Cooper goes from being a carpenter and retailer to a factory worker to a railroad executive and, ultimately, an advertising man, he grows less and less sympathetic and more callous to his wife. 

In the last scene, they reconcile in what seems to be a combination courtroom trial and circus scene that seems somewhat derivative of “Lady in the Dark” — and even more allegorical than “Allegro,” but, especially as played by the remarkably charismatic Mr. Mitchell and Ms. Baldwin, or Mr. de Lang and Ms. Corley, you can’t help but root for them.