There’s no revered American stage classic that I loathe more than Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth.” I studied it in school. I saw the 1975 Broadway revival starring Elizabeth Ashley and Alfred Drake, and was so young that I’d never heard of him. I was also so young that I didn’t walk out at intermission despite being bored as never before in the theater. I also saw the 2022 Broadway revival at Lincoln Center that the Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins adapted with “additional material” that made the play’s three hours seem more like four or five. I did not walk out at intermission, even though my date and half the audience bailed early, because I was reviewing.
What a pleasant surprise that director Leigh Silverman and book writer-lyricist-composer Ethan Lipton have turned “Skin” into the year’s best new musical. They’ve shortened the Wilder play to two and a half hours and they call it “The Seat of Our Pants,” which opened Thursday at the Public Theater.
Triple-threats of book writer, lyricist and composer in one person usually don’t work. Those who make that complicated mix work are few: Meredith Willson (“The Music Man”), Lionel Bart (“Oliver!”), Richard O’Brien (“The Rocky Horror Show”), Jonathan Larson (“Rent”), Lin-Manuel Miranda (“Hamilton”) and now Ethan Lipton.
In his far more respectful and leaden adaptation, Jacobs-Jenkins made the mistake of emphasizing Wilder’s sermons, especially the stuff about refugees. It squashed whatever elements of whimsical fantasy “Skin” has going for it. Wilder’s themes of outsiders, inevitability and survival remain in “Seat of Our Pants,” but Lipton handles them with inspired brevity and, of course, there’s his music to brighten things further.
As with most theater composers today, Lipton is very eclectic. There’s patter (“Telegram”), soft-shoe (“Everybody Loves to Go to Conventions”) and boozy lounge (“Ordinary Girl”), all beautifully handled. What really distinguishes Lipton is what sets apart the folk music of Woody Guthrie. “Better World A-Comin’” and “This Land Is My Land” seem to have been found rather than written. Many of Lipton’s songs also have that plucked-out-of-the-ether quality.
But sometimes there’s a sly difference. Take the wistful, haunting “Stuff It Down Inside,” which the maid Sabina, Mrs. Antrobus and the Telegram Boy sing to buck up each other’s confidence in the face of thousands of years of adversity. It takes a repeat or two of “stuff it down inside” before the giggles begin to rise in the audience. We’re so mesmerized by the lovely music that the tough and slightly clunky words don’t immediately register.
These characters are so old they hang out with Moses, keep dinosaurs for pets and have a son named Cain whom they had to rename Henry for his own safety – they have survived because they’re as ordinary as they are ornery.
That old Broadway praise “you come out humming the tunes” usually means you’ve heard the music before. Lipton’s gift for melody is so prodigious that he’s that rare exception: you leave the theater with absolutely gorgeous and original tunes floating on your lips.
The 2022 Broadway revival of “Skin,” under the direction of Lileana Blain-Cruz, was so overproduced that the extravagant sets and costumes worked to disguise what wasn’t happening on stage. In “Seat of Our Pants,” a few of the mammal costumes, by Kaye Voyce, are truly bizarre. Otherwise, director Leigh Silverman delivers a fairly bare-bones production, with the audience seated facing each other on opposite sides of the stage; the simple scenic design by Lee Jellinek. Silverman creates some very thrilling storms and wars, aided by Lap Chi Chu’s lighting and Drew Levy’s sound design.
Those many quick big moments aside, this “Seat of Our Pants” belongs to the singing actors, each of whom appears to have dropped in from Broadway’s musical stratosphere. Avid theatergoers will know the Id-driven maid Sabina (Micaela Diamond, “Parade”), the sometimes-stolid and sometimes-philandering Mr. Antrobus (Shuler Hensley, “Young Frankenstein”), the solid-to-a-fault Mrs. Antrobus (Ruthie Ann Miles, “The Light in the Piazza”), the spooky Fortune Teller (Ally Bonino, “Suffs”) and Henry Antrobus (Damon Daunno, “Oklahoma!”), who is the worst that mankind has to offer the world. These veteran actors are all working at the top of their form, and Michael Lepore’s ditzy Telegram Boy can be added to that illustrious list.
Lipton has also created a new character, the Announcer (Andy Grotelueschen, “Tootsie”). For “Skin of Our Teeth” curmudgeons like me, this narrator of the show turns into the playwright for the third act to offer a lengthy dissertation that is a spot-on deconstruction of the musical’s source material. For anyone who hates the Wilder play as much as I do, the speech is not only very funny. It is everything you wanted to tell your high school English teacher.
