‘A Walk on the Moon’: Adultery made easy listening (Off Broadway review)

Not all movies are crying out for musical adaptation. Add to that growing list A Walk on the Moon, a middling 1999 indie drama directed by Tony Goldwyn that featured a seriously miscast Diane Lane as a Jewish wife and mother of two who sneaks out of her Catskills cabin in the summer of 1969 to cheat on her plain-brown-shoe of a husband (Liev Schreiber) for a hippie-ish hunk of a traveling salesman (Viggo Mortensen). The passionate affair proves as ephemeral as face paint on the concert-goers at Woodstock, though the film boasts a mesmerizing performance by Anna Paquin (already an Oscar winner for 1994’s The Piano) as Pearl’s mildly rebellious teenage daughter.

Pamela Gray has adapted her own screenplay for the stage, with a mostly forgettable score by Annmarie Milazzo (and additional lyrics by Gray), that repeatedly begs the question: Why? It’s a question that the show can’t really answer, in part because it’s structured in a way that confounds attempts to fit the story into a recognizable musical theater format. Our frustrated heroine, Pearl (played by Talia Suskauer with moxie but not much yearning), waits until the show’s 11 o’clock number, a meandering ballad called “Not Willing to Lose,” to account for her desire to pursue an extramarital romance in the first place, the rationale that you’d expect to find in an Act 1 “I wish” song that never comes.

We follow Pearl through some everyday squabbles with her husband, Marty (Max Chernin), a TV repairman from Brooklyn who’s often delayed from joining his family on the weekends since it’s the summer of not only Woodstock but Neil Armstrong’s moon walk. It seems that functioning TV sets are much in demand. But Marty is not so much of a cad that we fully understand why she’d be drawn to the long-haired hunk Walker (Sam Gravitte), who sells clothes out of his caravan including a tie-dye t-shirt that improbably holds much significance for Pearl when Marty makes fun of it. (The period costumes are by Ricky Lurie.) Suskauer gets at least four downstage-center ballads but none of them provide any more explanation for her actions — especially after her tealeaf-reading mother-in-law (Andréa Burns) catches on to her cheating.

This show is saddled with odd choices, extraneous scenes, and missed opportunities. Pearl’s canasta group of young housewives introduce her to Betty Friedan in an up-tempo supposedly comedic number that would have seemed retrograde in 1969 (“Hey Betty, Hey Betty, keep your book cuz we ain’t ready,” they sing in unison). Wouldn’t it make more sense for Pearl to introduce The Feminine Mystique to the group and build up the nerve to explore her own agency based on the counsel of second-wave feminism? Walker becomes even more of a cipher than he was on film, a Jack Kerouac-loving dreamer bound for California who bonds with Pearl over poetry but is mindful to let her make the first moves when things turn romantic. (He foreshadows the kind of nice guy who respects consent.)

Suskauer and Gravitte sing prettily, but the score has a generic quality that feels unconnected to the story’s time period. The show could have gone the jukebox route, capturing an era when the pop charts were marked by old-fashioned hit-makers like Tom Jones and Frank Sinatra as well as more cutting-edge performers like Creedence Clearwater Revival and Led Zeppelin. Instead, we get tunes that feel timeless in a bad way. The one exception: Pearl’s daughter, Alison (Sophie Pollono, utterly charming), sings a jangly ode to first love that plays like a more than passable pastiche of her favorite artist, Joni Mitchell. Meanwhile, Alison’s guitar-wielding boyfriend (Oscar Williams) is writing a song for her that he never gets to perform.