In About Love, which is based on Turgenev’s First Love and set in nineteenth-century Russia, Jeffrey Kringer (right) is Peter and Silvia Bond plays Zina, the object of his adolescent affection.
Jazz artist Nancy Harrow is one of the New York music world’s greatest, though woefully underappreciated, treasures. During the Kennedy and Johnson eras, she was a regular on New York City’s cabaret circuit, singing with figures such as Kenny Barron, Bob Brookmeyer, and Jim Hall. Back then, Village Voice critic Nat Hentoff wrote: “Nancy Harrow is not jazz-influenced or jazz-tinged or jazz-pollinated. She is without qualification a jazz singer all the way.”
In About Love, Tom Patterson is triple-cast as a retired military captain, a hotelier, and the protagonist’s romantically unscrupulous father.
In recent years, Harrow has been composing music inspired by literary works. With dramatist Will Pomerantz, she turned her song cycle The Marble Faun—based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel and issued initially as a concept album—into a musical, For the Last Time, which ran Off-Broadway in 2015, where it attracted less attention than it deserved.
About Love, a new play written and directed by Pomerantz, features five numbers Harrow has composed in response to Ivan Turgenev’s 1860 novella First Love. This “play with songs and music” offers numerous pleasures but is unsatisfying on two counts. The script includes long stretches of static narration rather than dramatizing those parts of the story. And Harrow’s lovely musical contributions are scattered unevenly through the show’s 90 minutes, without a significant degree of integration.
The extent to which the music evokes the play’s 19th-century Russian setting is debatable, but Harrow’s melodies and attendant riffs—performed by the cast and a four-person combo led by guitarist Misha Josephs—capture the delicious unease of adolescent concupiscence, in which (to borrow Turgenev’s words) “hope and anticipation … [flutter] rapidly about the same fancies, like martins [around] a bell-tower at dawn.”
Zina (Bond) flirts with the wise Dr. Lushin (Dan Domingues) in About Love.
About Love is a faithful adaptation of Turgenev’s wistful story. Protagonist Peter (Jeffrey Kringer) is the only child of a well-educated, upper-middle class couple. Though supposedly studying for a university-admission exam, he is preoccupied with romantic fancies. The object of his yearning—Zina (Silvia Bond)—is a young noblewoman regularly surrounded by a swarm of eligible bachelors.
Zina’s mother is a widowed princess (Helen Coxe) who leases a dilapidated cottage next door to the villa where Peter’s family is spending the summer. Though an excellency in rank, the old woman teeters on the brink of poverty: rough-hewn and avaricious, she sponges off neighbors and borrows money wherever she can. Her coarse nature repels Peter’s genteel mother (Jean Tafler), while her daughter’s more cultivated charms are catnip not only to the unfledged Peter but also to the roving eye of his handsome, plenty-virile father (Tom Patterson).
At the heart of About Love is the confusion suffered by a sensitive adolescent as elements of the adult world—especially sex—come into partial focus yet remain baffling. As Peter reminisces from a later perspective: “[My parents’] marriage was a mystery to me, as it must be to all children who, when they’re born, are much younger than their parents, and are destined to be so the rest of their lives.” Sixteen-year-old Peter’s perplexity about the relationship among flesh, spirit, and mind is a function of what he’s learning—consciously or unconsciously—from the differing attitudes of those around him (not least his father and mother) to desire, temptation, and responsibility.
Helen Coxe as Count Malevsky, one of three roles she plays in About Love. Photographs by Russ Rowland.
The Culture Project, out of the spotlight for several years, has given About Love a simple, eye-appealing production in the black-box bowels of the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture. Brian C. Staton’s scenic design—stark and gray as the trunk of a beech tree—is an ideal canvas on which Allen Hahn, with intricate lighting, paints weather, seasons, and times of day.
Four actors in the fine, six-member cast juggle three roles each with quicksilver aplomb. Of particular note are Dan Domingues as the wise Dr. Lushin, Coxe as petulant, self-satisfied Count Malevsky, and Patterson as Peter’s scapegrace father.
Only the leads—Kringer and Bond—play single parts throughout. These two, making their Off-Broadway debuts, have exquisite stage presence and a youthful freshness that’s just right. What’s missing is chemistry to suggest genuine reciprocity in this story of first love and to dispel the possibility that Zina is an out-and-out tease with Peter and a golddigger in her dealings with his father. It’s hard to say whether the uncertainty is a function of what the two young actors bring (or don’t bring) to their roles or of the play’s direction.
The universality of Turgenev’s concerns gives his original work—as well as this music-theater piece—an up-to-the-minute quality that’s unexpected in art rooted in the Victorian era. Turgenev belongs to the world of European Romanticism; yet Nancy Harrow, who’s “jazz all the way,” proves to be a natural ally. What Harrow has demonstrated, in the songs of About Love and throughout her career, is that jazz, with its tractability of style and sound, is an idiom well-suited to what’s timeless in the human heart.
About Love at the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture (18 Bleecker St.) has closed abruptly because of the coronavirus outbreak.
