The Flood

In the rather remarkable score that Peter Mills and Cara Reichel have crafted for their ambitious musical The Flood, sentiments of unusual poeticism and clarity come out of the mouths of some fairly prosaic characters. This neatly sums up the show’s strength and weakness.

First workshopped in 2001 by the Prospect Theater Company, of which Mills and Reichel are co-founders, The Flood is a portrait of fictional Meyerville, Illinois, which is devastated by the same real-life flood that destroyed numerous Midwestern towns in the summer of 1993. The show’s ultimate message, about the ability of both individual people and a community to rebound from such a disaster, is a heartwarming one. However, the musical would come off far more effectively if Mills and Reichel had spent more time examining the aftermath of the flood and the process in which Meyerville’s citizens decide whether to stay or go, and far less time on setting up conventional back-stories that seem designed mostly to make us “care” about the townspeople. The result is oddly reminiscent of the lesser work of Thornton Wilder.

The Flood focuses on two parallel plotlines: Wise-beyond-her-years high school senior Alice (Jamie Davis) is valiantly coping with her Bible-quoting widowed father, Ezekiel (Drew Poling); her mentally challenged 15-year-old sister, Rosemary (the believable Jennifer Blood)’ and the advances of her slightly immature inamorata Raleigh (Matt DeAngelis), son of the town’s mayor (Joseph O’Brien). Meanwhile, good-guy farmer Curtis (Jonathan Rayson) has finally convinced Susan, his girlfriend of five years and the town’s schoolteacher (Catherine Porter), to marry him, but her ambivalence remains.

While the show’s book often struggles to give three dimensions to this quartet, the score — which is credited to both Mills, a Drama Desk nominee for The Pursuit of Persephone, and Reichel — succeeds magnificently in expressing their personalities. Raleigh brilliantly describes the town’s July 4th fireworks while also describing his own wanderlust in the beautiful “Runaways.” Curtis questions his long-held beliefs, passed down from generation to generation, in the plaintive “My Father’s Song.” In the lovely “From Here,” Alice looks down on the remains of Meyerville and realizes that everything has changed even as it has remained the same. And in what may be the show’s finest number, “Float,” Susan returns to her waterlogged house and discovers that, in its “death,” she has discovered her own rebirth. The foursome also lead The Flood‘s most haunting group number, “The Song of the Cicadas.”

Nicely directed by Reichel, the show benefits greatly from the uniformly fine performances of these four actors — especially Porter, whose acidity adds some fire to the proceedings, and DeAngelis, who smartly captures the quicksilver moodiness of adolescence. Kudos also to the 15 ensemble members who play the townpeople. On the downside, in large part because of the production’s timing, Mills and Reichel simply can’t make the conceit of the river being personified by a large black woman (the talented A’lisa D. Miles) come off as anything but a variation of Caroline, or Change.

It’s possible that audiences who have had more first-hand knowledge of natural disasters may respond more strongly to the show than the average New Yorker like myself, whose idea of “water damage” goes no further than the occasionally leaky toilet. Still, The Flood should unleash a flood of tears at its end, rather than mere admiration.