New musical focuses on mother with Alzheimer's

The NY Times review. In the picture, Leslie Kritzer, left, as the daughter, and Catherine Cox as her mother, in “The Memory Show.”

PITTSFIELD, Mass. — “The Memory Show,” which recently opened at Barrington Stage Company here, is a musical in search of a melody. That is what it intends to be. In shaping a portrait of a mother with Alzheimer’s disease and the angry, impotent daughter who cares for her, the young composer Zach Redler has written a score that follows the patterns of minds grasping, often in vain, for clarity, conviction and lost time.

During spoken sections of this embryonic show, which has a book and lyrics by Sara Cooper, seemingly random notes from a lone piano drift teasingly through the air, hinting at half-forgotten songs but never arranging themselves into a tune you can follow. There are unresolvable struggles taking place within this quiet, gentle music: between recollection and the past, between individual visions of earlier days, and between a parent and child who are both inextricably connected and unconquerably separate.

For those who ask why anyone would write a musical about a subject as depressing as senility, the answer is in Mr. Redler and Ms. Cooper’s songs. They feel organically linked to their subject in ways seldom found on Broadway these days. Like “Next to Normal,” another musical with a seemingly off-putting medical subject (bipolar disorder), “The Memory Show” suggests that fresh frontiers remain for creators of musicals.

Not that “The Memory Show” seems destined to follow the inspirational path of “Next to Normal,” which after a highly flawed Off Broadway incarnation, went on to reinvent itself as Pulitzer Prize-winning dynamo. “The Memory Show” is small — two performers, one piano, 75 minutes — and ultimately static. And in its structure and dialogue it is neither quite daring enough to succeed as a bold experiment nor conventional enough to be a plucky little crowd pleaser.

Still, as a work that extends the perimeters of what a musical should and can deal with, “The Memory Show” is a heartening testament to the virtues of Barrington’s Musical Theater Lab, overseen by the composer William Finn (“Falsettos,” “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee”). Directed with caressing affection by Joe Calarco, “The Memory Show” has been given a neophyte’s dream production.

Brian Prather’s poetically evocative set is an ideal forum for this musical’s battle of wills, adorned with a patterned gallery of picture frames, both empty and filled. More important, the show is blessed with two gifted and seasoned actresses — Leslie Kritzer and Catherine Cox — who commit themselves unconditionally to material that is as difficult technically as it emotionally. And with Vadim Feichtner at the piano, the music itself becomes a third character that both connects and divides the others.

Neither character is very likable, and the women portraying them never make cheap bids for sympathy. But it’s partly because of this that they win our empathy — that and an ability to invest Mr. Redler’s seemingly wayward musical lines with a wondering sadness that is both harsh and sweet.

Ms. Kritzer, a rising Broadway talent (“A Catered Affair,” “Sondheim on Sondheim”), is the daughter, who at 31 returns to the home where she grew up to be the caretaker of her mother, played by Ms. Cox. (These characters are identified only as Mother and Daughter, a system of nomenclature I always find annoying and which here gives them more universal weight than they should have to bear.)

Neither woman (or should I say Woman?) could exactly be described as a success. Daughter has notched up a string of equally short-lived jobs and relationships, while Mother is bitter and defensively antic, with a history of mental instability and at least one suicide attempt. Mother was, Daughter notes, always difficult. And as the older woman’s mind weakens, it is often hard to distinguish between the vagaries of a capricious personality and the erosions of an illness.

Those are not the only distinctions blurred in “The Memory Show.” The women have highly dissimilar recollections of the past they shared and particularly of the dead man one of them knew (unhappily) as a husband and the other (reverentially) as a father. Such plot as “The Memory Show” has is built on a “secret” that Mother keeps threatening to divulge, which has to do with the nature of her marriage. This leads to an 11 o’clock climactic revelation that feels forced, as if someone had arbitrarily decided that a Big Moment was called for.

Tales of a grown-up child coming home in a last-chapter attempt to reconcile with an elderly estranged parent are a long-time staple of popular fiction, and Ms. Cooper’s script doesn’t avoid the clichés of the genre. It’s when “The Memory Show” sings that it transcends the expected and achieves a haunting originality.

Listen, for example, to Ms. Cox and Ms. Kritzer performing catalog songs — of lists, of facts, of things to do — against errant, runaway rhythms. Or hear how they fight vainly to melt into musical harmony in the dissonant duet “You Remember Him Wrong” (about you-know-who). The conflict within such songs is more than that of a mother and daughter at odds or even of perception and truth in collision.

There is also the ineffable, plaintive strain of a will to be happy, to make things right, of a major key trying to assert itself in a minor-key world. What’s most striking about “The Memory Show” is its ability to grasp and translate the elusive into song. No, you don’t go home humming the tunes from this production. But the ambivalence embedded in the music stays with you.