Here is my Monday June 8 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Friday June 5, 2009, concert performance of Camelot at Ravinia Festival's 2009 season opening night.
Merry, unnecessary 'Camelot'
REVIEW | Singers stellar, but thin musical unworthy of a Ravinia revival
There's no doubt that Ravinia's Music Theater Initiative has been one of the great successes of Welz Kauffman's eight years as chief of the Highland Park festival. With five stunning Stephen Sondheim revivals, Patti LuPone's first outing in Gypsy, and a brilliant remounting of Frank Loesser's operetta The Most Happy Fella in 2007, Ravinia has been the Chicago area place to see top-flight live performances of Broadway's best with full orchestra and top casts and conductors.
Perhaps because of this success, Ravinia's been hard pressed to top or match its presentations to date, taking a breather last summer and spreading its offerings over several nights this summer with LuPone returning August 8 for a Kurt Weill evening with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, David Hyde Pierce heading a Cole Porter night August 16, and the original stars of Lincoln Center's smash remount of South Pacific in a Rodgers & Hammerstein tribute on September 6.
(Oscar Lopez/For the Sun-Times)
The concert staging of a musical this year seemed almost an afterthought, then, even if it launched the whole Ravinia season on Friday night and brought back the three excellent leads from Fella: George Hearn, Sylvia McNair, and Rod Gilfry. This year's show was a one-night-only, non-costumed, non-decorated presentation of Camelot, an inferior work that owes much of its fame to its posthumous identification with President John F. Kennedy and his 1,000 days in Washington. Presumably it was chosen this year at least in part because of the arrival of an idealistic young Hyde Park couple in the White House.
In the arts, non-artistic reasons for fame are as poor as non-artistic reasons for a revival, and while the excellent cast made every song sound its best and Broadway whiz Paul Gemignani, a last-minute sub for an ailing Erich Kunzel, had the Ravinia Festival Orchestra playing beautifully, Lerner and Loewe's 1960 retelling of the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table has been an imperfect work since before its troubled launch almost 50 years ago. Lawn attendance was sparse despite a beautiful evening, and the Pavilion crowd lacked the variety of ages previous efforts have drawn in.
Camelot's unwieldy book can either be presented at its great and dull length or chopped, as it was here, so that the second act makes no sense at all. None of the lyrics come close to Lerner's achievements in My Fair Lady five years earlier, and Loewe's tunes for this, his last original stage score, are much more Easy Listening than Great American Songbook.
Still, kudos to Kauffman for getting Ravinia mainstay Hearn to take up his first Arthur two weeks before his 75th birthday: from the title song and his first spoken narratives on, this was a perfect and poignant performance. McNair gave Arthur's queen, Guenevere, all that can be given to a part already old-fashioned in 1961. As Nathan Gunn did with the New York Philharmonic last year, Rod Gilfry sang Lancelot's songs of self-importance beautifully and nobly, and if "If Ever I Would Leave You" shaded a bit into Robert Goulet's original at times, well, isn't that part of the point?
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