In the 180 years since it was first published, Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo has continued to cast its spell on readers and audiences. The French produced a pricey feature adaptation in 2024, and a miniseries starring Sam Claflin and Jeremy Iron debuts this month on PBS’s Masterpiece. The plight of Edmond Dantès, a low-born but sympathetic seaman who survives wrongful imprisonment to exact a baroquely elaborate revenge plot, continues to hold appeal in a world with growing wealth disparity and the feeling that society’s haves secured their status through dubious means. Dumas’s story was revolutionary in other ways, too, including his depiction of the daughter of one of the treacherous villains as a proto-lesbian who runs off to Paris with her female music instructor.
But few modern readers would suggest that what Dumas’s story was missing was music. Monte Cristo, which opened at Off Broadway’s York Theatre, boasts an unabashedly old-fashioned score by Stephen Weiner along with a much-streamlined but rather ham-fisted book by Peter Kellogg (who also wrote the lyrics). Kellogg borrows heavily from Charles Fechter’s 1868 English-language stage adaptation, which jettisons many characters and subplots and inserts a radical rationale for why Edmond’s beloved, Mercedes, marries his treacherous rival so soon after his arrest. (By the way, it’s Fechter’s play that James O’Neill performed on stage for decades and grew to resent so fervently that it inspired a plot point in his son Eugene’s A Long Day’s Journey Into Night.)
Weiner’s songs hearken back to classic Broadway in their construction, with recitativo-like verses leaning into workmanlike refrains and melodies that are pleasant but unmemorable. Ensemble numbers are laden with exposition and scene-setting while striving for the grandiosity of earlier, better history-based musicals like Les Misérables or Phantom of the Opera. The cast even don masquerade-style masks for an early second act number, where Siena Zoë Allen and Amanda Roberge’s luxurious period costumes upstage the harmonies. The physical production is impressive, from Annie Mundell’s set design to Alan C. Edwards’s lighting.
Adam Jacobs (Broadway’s original Aladdin) proves a stolid and somewhat wooden Edmond, flashing more determination to get through the intricacies of the plot than to convey any individual emotions as he endures various setbacks. His rich baritone blends nicely with the still-ravishing Sierra Boggess, a silken-voiced love interest who’s sidelined for so much of the play that she lacks both agency and personality. Daniel Yearwood and James Judy maintain an almost cartoonish villainousness as the strivers who frame Edmond for treason and then profit handsomely with similarly crooked schemes in post-Napoleonic France.
The most interesting character may be Caderousse (Danny Rutigliano, who also plays Edmond’s erudite prison mentor Abbe Faria), an innkeeper pal of Edmund’s who was too drunk and weak-willed to prevent his arrest but becomes his loyal manservant in revenge. Caderousse and his no-nonsense wife (Karen Ziemba, nicely brassy) provide much of the show’s comic relief and are clearly fashioned on the similarly crass Thénardiers from Les Miz.
While Kellogg has streamlined the story, dropping many characters and post-prison subplots, the second act is still a narrative slog that introduces a bunch of new characters as part of Edmond’s scheme to take down the three men he blames for his imprisonment. One target, Norm Lewis’s repentant prosecutor Villefort, is dispatched so quickly that you may wonder why he wasn’t excised altogether. (The underwritten role is a waste of the great actor’s gifts.)
Other tweaks to the Dumas story frankly make no sense. We meet a pasha’s daughter, Haydee (Stephanie Jae Park), who’s introduced as Edmond’s companion/mistress but turns out to be a mere pawn in his revenge scheme since Mercedes’s husband also wronged her family. Then there’s Eugenie (Kate Fitzgerald), the daughter of one of Edmond’s rivals and the girly-girl fiancée of Mercedes’s son, Albert (Jadon Lopez). No sooner does she begin to question the soundness of her engagement to her childhood pal — “What if the feeling you have in your gut turns out to be gas?” she sings in one of the show’s wittier lines — than she’s ogling Haydee, feeling the princess’s biceps, dumping her own corseted outfit, and pulling a boy’s cap over her long ginger tresses. The abrupt shift in character is whiplash-inducing. That’s no way to treat one of Western literature’s first great tomboys and queer icons.
It’s also no way to treat Dumas’s classic. Or to update it for modern audiences in a way that feels fresh. The director, Peter Flynn, seems overwhelmed by the scope of the material; some numbers end, bizarrely and abruptly, while the soloist is walking off stage into darkness. Monte Cristo misses both the novel’s romanticism and its propulsive energy. Despite noble intentions and some promising elements, call this one down for the count. ★★☆☆☆
MONTE CRISTO
York Theatre at Theatre at St. Jean’s, Off Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes (with one intermission)
Tickets on sale through April 5 for $29 to $79