‘Camelot’ Broadway Review: Aaron Sorkin Leaves The Magic To His Cast
14.04.2023 - 01:51
/ deadline.com
What’s a Camelot without a little magic?
Aaron Sorkin works up an answer to that question in the new Lincoln Center Theater production of the 1960 Lerner & Loewe musical, and the result is an adaptation that seems at every turn to be pleading its case for its own relevance. Where the West Wing creator conjured a real sort of writerly sorcery in 2018 with his transformation of the beloved property To Kill A Mockingbird into a new, relevant and thrilling stage work, his efforts this time around often seem strained in their attempts to drag Camelot into the 21st Century.
In its way, Camelot, at least as we’ve come to know it until now, is, in its stodgy and fitful way, a musical as emblematic of the 1960s as the more obvious generation-defining theatrical statements of the era (“Gimme a head with hair!”). Camelot, with its “might for right” social idealism and tested faith in political heroism, was ever-so-ripe for Jacqueline Kennedy’s picking as a post-JFK myth-maker, a salve for the walking wounded.
And all with a score that was at once lovely and middlebrow, a reminder to today’s audiences that the 1960s weren’t all Beatles and “Aquarius” – throwback Robert Goulet was there too, intoning “If Ever I Would Leave You” on Ed Sullivan and seemingly every other variety show of the age.
Sorkin, whose West Wing placed Kennedy Era idealism firmly and entertainingly, if not always convincingly, into the worlds of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, tries his best to drag Camelot (and its clunky Alan Jay Lerner book) into a post-Trump universe, reuniting with his Mockingbird director Bartlett Sher to make lightning strike twice. It doesn’t, though there are a few flashes that throw enough illumination to let us see where he was