Word: sondheimer
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...Weiss's extraordinary range. Dashing around the cramped apartment, the actors create a pair of convincingly frustrated personalities entirely through song, since no dialogue connects one number to the next. Weiss in particular has a voice that stays equally strong and flexible over several octaves, and her command of Sondheim's sliding harmonies is impressive. When she and Kerns sing love songs, the intensity level goes so high that the inevitable "someone" reference flips us back with a shock: what we're watching is not real, it's just another fantasy. Both singers reach their peak in the climactic title...
...Sondheim-as-Jacques-Brel image to which Marry Mc A Little pays homage is among the more limited of these roles, perhaps because it is set so firmly in one particular milieu. The songs that make up this essentially plotless revue about a man and woman--each alone on a Saturday night in the same apartment building--could not possibly refer to any society but that of upper-middle-class singles in Manhattan. There are references to reading the Sunday Times, or Saturday night prowling various bars, putting up with parents and their querulous worries about their kids...
Stringing 19 of Sondheim's upper-Manhattan-loneliness-love-songs together with only a sketchy, if provocative, plot does not seem to be a fundamentally good idea. Which is not to say that the songs aren't clever, funny, and tuneful, or that their presentation in the Leverett Old Library leaves anything to be desired in terms of theatrical technique. On the contrary, the difficulties in structure often have the effect of creating more levels of meaning, especially with two extremely skilled performers there to explore those levels...
...songs themselves, though they never coalesce into any particular logical sequence, offer a good deal of emotional food for thought. Sondheim almost never gives into the simplistic. All 19 songs fall into the relationships genre which is his specialty, treating first thrill breakup and all the shades of happiness and disillusion in between. A few numbers like "Bang!", are explicitly sexual; others fit into a dreamier romantic mode, crooning, "Who could be blue when some-where, there is you?" Others are about frustration, repressed and not so repressed: In "Saturday Night," both singers declare together, "Alive and alone...
...brisk musical direction and David Reiffel's sophisticated, rapid-fire blocking. After 19 successive dousings in intense musical emotion, the audience probably couldn't manage more than the hour the show occupies. Marry Mc A Little isn't cathartic, and it doesn't leave the satisfying sense that Sondheim has worked out the problems of love; then again, no one would really expect him to. Instead, his insights are left vacue enough and universal enough to roll anybody up, and that makes the show as good a way as any to spend Saturday night--even alone...