'Romantic Poetry' stumbles in its tale of love

NEW YORK—Love -- or maybe just ruminating on love -- can drive a person to do wild, crazy and sometimes foolish things, such as write a musical.

How else to explain "Romantic Poetry," the bewildering collaboration of John Patrick Shanley (book, lyrics and heavy-handed direction) and Henry Krieger (music) that opened Tuesday off-Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club's Stage I.

The show is quite a befuddlement, a convoluted tale of aggressive, absurdist whimsy that charts the romantic entanglements of Fred and Connie. Played by Ivan Hernandez and Emily Swallow, they're a couple of tough-talking cookies whose marriage starts to unravel as soon as the honeymoon begins. The musical goes downhill, too, trapping six game actors in an increasingly discombobulated story that dredges up Connie's past husbands and the fact that she was never properly divorced from the first one -- which certainly calls into question the legality of her subsequent liaisons.

Shanley is best known these days as the author of "Doubt." His treatise on faith and the perils of certainty was one of the big theater success stories of the last decade.

But before he wrote that Pulitzer Prize and Tony winner, Shanley specialized in chronicling combative male-female relationships in such plays as "Danny and the Deep Blue Sea" and "Italian-American Reconciliation" and in his screenplay for the movie "Moonstruck."

With its parade of quarreling couples, "Romantic Poetry" is a direct descendant of these works. Fred and Connie are nervy, unabashedly emotional and physically volatile. Sounds perfect for a musical. But it's not. Shanley's story dawdles and then detours to include Connie's mentally quirky first husband (Jeb Brown) and her comic, impish number two (a delightful Mark Linn-Baker).

And we haven't even gotten to Frankie (Jerry Dixon), a caterer who, by the time Act 2 rolls around, morphs into a deli owner and Mary (Patina Renea Miller), who becomes a painter. Their matchup seems almost like a throwaway subplot despite the strong voices and appealing personalities of both performers.

But then they haven't been given much with which to work. Shanley's lyrics are often awkward or obvious, and so are his stabs at humor.

Krieger, who wrote the music for such shows as "Dreamgirls" and "Side Show," has better luck with his melodies. They are frequently engaging and certainly eclectic, ranging from torch to gospel to operatic to even quasi-Hawaiian. And Krieger doesn't neglect Linn-Baker, who has the style and wit of a genuine song-and-dance man. He'd make a delightful Og, the leprechaun, in a revival of "Finian's Rainbow."

"Romantic Poetry" trumpets the idea of verse elevating the language of love, a noble sentiment indeed. Too bad the poetry -- or what passes for poetry -- on display at Manhattan Theatre Club makes you think of anything but romance.