The Mistress Cycle

THE OTHER WOMEN Charissa Armon, front, communes with Susie McMonagle.

Photo: Michael Brosilow

Giering and Blatt’s 2005 work reminds me of nothing more than another “song cycle,” Jason Robert Brown’s 1995 Songs for a New World, which I reviewed favorably in a BoHo production in late 2007 around the same time this iteration of The Mistress Cycle first appeared at Apple Tree. Blatt and Giering’s score feels like a cousin of Brown’s, full of story-songs that stand up well on their own as musical theater in miniature, the kind of pieces that the showtune enamored favor at open-mike nights.

Why, then, does this remount leave me flat? It’s partly because Blatt and Giering attempt a more profound connection among their characters than really exists implying a direct affiliation among women who sleep with men they’re not married to—but it’s tough to draw a line of equivalence, whether moral or emotional, from a barely pubescent Chinese concubine to a 16th-century royal consort to a modern-day New York professional contemplating an affair.

The venue is another problem. The Auditorium Theatre is rightly vaunted for its perfect acoustics—if you’re sitting in the house. But placing the audience on the stage in a three-quarter thrust design means all of the sound is sucked up into the fly loft. The work of five immensely capable actors with gorgeous voices and their able musical director is deadened. The massive void of the empty house looms over us, feeling appropriately, oppressively like The Man.

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