A Walk on the Moon @ the Laura Pels Theatre

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The Play: A Walk on the Moon;  a musical based on the 1999 movie about a working-class Jewish housewife who finds herself falling for a hunky hippie-type guy during the pivotal the summer of 1969 when the nation is riveted by the first moon landing, the want-more-from-life stirrings of feminism have begun to affect average women and the Woodstock music festival is about to take place not too far away from the bungalow colony where she and her kids are vacationing while her nice-guy husband works in the city 

Book & Additional Lyrics by: Pamela Gray        Music and Lyrics by: Annmarie Milazzo

One good thing: The leads—particularly Talia Suskauer, Max Chernin as her cuckolded husband and Sophie Pollono as their teenaged daughter—sing well and work hard to flesh out their somewhat underwritten characters

One not-so-great thing: Sorry but there are so many things; the most egregious may be that neither the writers nor director Sheryl Kaller offer a compelling reason to tell this story now (maybe a framing device might have helped), the score also doesn't take full advantage of how the popular music of the time morphed from the middle-of-the-road songs of Perry Como and Patty Page to the psychedelic sounds of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin; and don’t even get me started on the often-hazy video projections that distract from rather than illuminate the narrative

 


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