Follow-up acts to blockbuster successes can take on any number of guises so when Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice thought about what direction to go in after their 1978 mega-hit, Evita, they decided to go small. That’s one theory of how they came up with the concept for Tell Me on a Sunday, a one person show about a British woman’s search for love (and a green card) in the Big Apple back when something called the internet was in its infancy. Debuting a decade after Title IX was passed into law and more than twenty years before the Me Too Movement gripped the world’s consciousness, Tell Me on a Sunday’s depiction of what motivates women can look a little narrow and a bit shallow to contemporary eyes. Which is one reason why critics these days seem to snub their noses at its portrayal of a young woman on the road to self-discovery. But the play’s current production at Theo Ubique featuring Dani Pike in the starring role goes a long way to leaven such notions. It also happens to be a dynamite show despite the book’s questionable treatment of the featured character.
A one-act song cycle, the musical might catch some audiences off guard because of its scarcity of actual dialog. Lloyd Webber is credited for the book and composing the music for the production. As a result of some behind the scenes intrigue, Don Black rather than Tim Rice wrote its lyrics. There’s no question the music is splendid. And keyboardist and conductor, Evelyn Ryan; along with her all-female band, play it magnificently. But, because song cycles are groups of songs meant to be sung in sequence and as a unit, the story’s meat is in the lyrics. They’re our windows into the central character and the dynamics of her life.
At first, the one Emma (Dani Pike) occupies looks pleasingly ordinary. A young woman newly emigrated to New York City from England, single, active in the dating scene and writing enthusiastic letters back home telling her parents how optimistic she feels about life, she seems fulfilled. Even the breakup she has with her boyfriend reads as relatively innocuous; just one of life’s more rattling speed bumps as she tells herself in It’s Not the End of the World (If I Lose Him).
Dani Pike in Tell Me on a Sunday – image courtesy of Time Stops Photography
The flag starts to turn an ominous shade of red when she meets and is smitten by Sheldon Bloom, a Hollywood mogul who wants to take her back to California with him when he wraps up his business in the city. According to the song that bears his name, he’s loaded, ensconced in a pink mansion and has connections that might fast track her green card. He’s also “older”. There’s no hesitancy in her decision to follow him out to the celluloid jungle and the portrait she paints of LA in Capped Teeth and Caesar Salad looks strikingly like the one Danzy Seena reveals of Hollywood and LA in her latest novel, Colored Television. Spectacular, humorous, dismal. Although movingly performed, when she sings You Made Me Think You Were in Love, there’s a discernible conviction deficit detected in the heart of her delivery. Questions that have been nudging themselves to the forefront of the mind begin to become more assertive. Why is she having her future determined by the men in her life? Who is the person besides somebody’s girlfriend?
Rather than getting a clear answer to either question, we witness the confirmation of a pattern when she moves back to New York. Another man. Another heartbreak. A resilient spirit becomes her saving grace though she returns to for the purpose of replenishing her determination and will. It also energizes the production and instills it with luminescent promise.
Pike’s performance contributes mightily to the sense that her character will eventually put herself first. You get a sense of that breakthrough in the song that gives the play its name, Tell Me on a Sunday, that says let’s dispense with the histrionics and part with equanimity. Like each of the songs that sustain and propel the musical, Pike renders it with a radiant display of craftsmanship and charisma that leaves the audiences rapt. Eleanor Kahn’s tiered, casually elegant scenic design keeps her elevated and the center of attention, while giving the theater’s cabaret atmosphere a touch of Vegas shimmer and glam.
Making her directorial debut with this production, Keely Vasquez is keen to extract and present the full dimensions of Emma’s character; including those that extend beyond the words of a song or that are relayed through swatches of dialogue. It’s that effort’s success, along with Pike’s glorious performance, that places Tell Me on a Sunday on the exceptional shelf and makes it such a smashing night of theater.
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