• Camelot 

4/2/23 (Sun), Lincoln Center

The magic is gone from this musical in more ways than one. Still in previews, it’s selling robustly on the strength of Bartlett Sher’s reputation with his past Lincoln Center productions, including an awesome South Pacific and The King & I and a woke (but popular) version of Lerner and Loewe’s previous show My Fair Lady. These productions offered gorgeous costumes and scenery, full orchestras with lush arrangements, and top-class performers. I was discouraged at first after reading an interview with the Lancelot, who boasted that the show included actors who are blind and use prosthetics so as to better represent America. See what’s missing there? How about talent? In any event, curiosity got the better of me, and I managed to get an excellent non-premium ticket (center orchestra!) an hour before showtime.

The original 1960 show is a mess due to a convoluted book that doesn’t seem to know what it wants to say, partly a function of a disastrous birthing process (the director and writer/lyricist both suffered heart attacks during rehearsals). It involves a love triangle on the one hand and a meditation by Arthur on the other on the nature of government and kingship. It doesn’t do very well on either side, and previous revivals have had to rely on star casting like Richard Harris or Robert Goulet to sell tickets. Its grand Arthurian setting and great score make it a tempting target for a revisal, but any serious attempt would necessarily involve major surgery. This time, they’ve recruited film, TV and stage writer Aaron Sorkin to try to make sense out of it. Sorkin’s recent work on To Kill a Mockingbird, where he tried to update the material to modern sensibilities, should have been a warning sign.

Here, too, Sorkin is more interested in relevance than coherence. He keeps the basic structure of the story in place, a big mistake in some cases: for instance, the two key characters of Morgan Le Fey and Mordred are not introduced until Act II, a serious structural flaw that Sorkin should have addressed. He seems content mainly to add snappy dialogue. Arthur and Guenevere become modern Disney characters. Sorkin seeks to gives agency to the latter, now a sassy French princess, while Arthur is a metrosexual with more relaxed ideas than his predecessors on how to run a kingdom, deal with tradition, and handle a woman (as the song goes). The hunky French knight Lancelot comes on the scene and promptly attracts the eye of Guenevere, who is by now Arthur’s wife and thus the queen of England. When the two are caught in a compromising position, all heck breaks loose.

In Sorkin’s most striking change, the magical element that was such a big part of the musical (and the source novel and the thousand-year legend itself) was eliminated, an interesting idea in theory and one that works more or less with Merlyn. But Morgan becomes a scientist with ideas that no one in Arthurian England could possibly have dreamed of. Also, it turns out that Arthur is not so special for having pulled the legendary sword from the stone; Guenevere dismisses this by pointing out that scores of people had simply loosened it before him. Really? Sorkin seems to be missing the point. When Lancelot seems to bring a knight back to life in the original, the moment is credible given the presence of magic elsewhere. Here, Arthur takes the place of the knight, and makes explicit that he simply had the wind knocked out of him and regained consciousness on his own, denying all possibility of a miracle. That does the book a disservice.

I’m not sure what to think of the anachronisms, which I presume are deliberate: in addition to Morgan’s scientific utterings, the show refers at one point to Voltaire, and one character states, “The Middle Ages won’t end by itself” – how does he know it’s the Middle Ages? Sorkin is going for the easy laugh here. Magic would have been more believable. (The original Merlyn lives backwards and has thus experienced the future, validating his anachronisms.)

Phillipa Soo as Guenevere could use another dimension or two in her acting. She had the usual snarky approach of recent young screen women; after spending most of the show putting down Arthur, she proclaims at the end that she’s always loved him. Is that so? She was so intent on playing the strong woman that it was tough to see that she cared at all about Arthur, much less how he could possibly have fallen for her. But Soo does have a terrific voice, which makes up for a lot of flaws. Andrew Burnap as Arthur was fine within the bounds of the wimpy character he was given.

The best of the leads by far was Jordan Donica as Lancelot. I had seen the actor before as Thomas Jefferson in Hamilton in LA, but that was a lampoon. This was a real character, and he triumphed easily over the problematic material. He has a spectacular voice and knocked all his songs out of the park. (But did they have to leave his hair in that unkempt mop rather than something a Lancelot might wear? Or is his character actually supposed to be black?) The other standout was Dakin Matthews as Pellinore and especially Merlyn, the only one in the cast who even attempted an English accent in this most English of stories.

Morgan Le Fey was excellent in her 5-10 minutes of stage time, but her character appears out of nowhere and quickly goes back there. The idea that Arthur would be sending letters once a week for years trying to meet her is dumb – he is the king, after all; it would be pretty easy to arrange a meeting regardless of what she thinks, assuming she’s a mortal rather than the magical presence of the original. Ditto on the idea that she would have burned all his letters and given the accompanying money to charity. Charity? Please. (And didn’t Arthur figure that his wife might be a little peeved to discover that he was ardently reaching out to his ex-lover all these years?) Their illegitimate son is also a half-hearted plot device and badly overacted here. These characters are where Sorkin should have been more drastic in his rewriting. They feel like last-minute additions to a plot that was already sputtering at the end of Act 1.

The rest of the cast (including little Tom of Warwick, played naturally by a black child) was impeccably diverse, much more so than the audience, which was overwhelmingly white and disproportionately older. For the record, I didn’t notice the blind or one-limbed performers that one actor had bragged about, who were evidently kept safely out of harm’s way.

Unusually for Sher’s Lincoln Center revivals, the show offered a minimal set with a strong reliance on projections. The stage felt very large at times. The direction was fluid, making use of entrances as always from all sides of the theater. There was a great opening as knights appear over the horizon, and the swordfight livened things up later. The appearance of tents at the end was startling as it was the only substantial physical scenery.

One very positive point: the orchestra, incredible as per the high standard of Lincoln Center shows. What a joy to hear that score with a full orchestra and those amazing orchestrations in that theater, and so wonderfully sung. The lack of scenery made it feel almost like a concert at times, and maybe it would have been better that way rather than struggling with this book.

This will not be the definitive Camelot, which needs a book writer willing to take a braver look at the material rather than simply fiddling at the edges. Sorkin has succeeded in creating a more assertive Guenevere and a wise scientist in Morgan Le Fey, but to what end? The show is a disappointment. Still, at least it’s one beautiful to see and hear.