Review: In Reunions, a Liberated Woman Says Her Piece and Old Lovers Play Hard to Get

There’s something uniquely quaint about an evening of one-acts. It’s the theatrical equivalent of a grazing board, an opportunity to nibble without ever getting too full, or at least too full of one thing. Playwright Jeffrey Scharf and composer Jimmy Calire serve audiences such digestible fare at New York City Center Stage II with Reunions, their musicalized pairing of two plays, each about a chance meeting between ex-lovers. It’s a welcome night of light and airy entertainment, but one that’s disappointingly short on flavor.

Scharf and Calire have gone Edwardian. Both pieces of source material date back to the 1910s and feature all the pulled-up postures, chaste manners, and formal daywear that give the era such allure (Jen Caprio’s costumes, complemented by J. Jared Janas’s wigs, pull off the period aesthetic). They partner The Twelve-Pound Look, a feminist piece by J.M. Barrie of Peter Pan fame, with Serafín and Joaquín Álvarez Quintero’s A Sunny Morning, a Spanish tale of romance rekindled decades after a youthful dalliance. Helmed by Gabriel Barre, the cast is speckled with gems of the New York stage. And still, Calire’s score—a collection of nondescript tunes jam-packed with exposition—makes an unconvincing argument that either of these charming plays were meant to sing.

Chilina Kennedy is the main event in The Twelve-Pound Look. With quiet grit, stony sarcasm, and a strong, versatile voice, she plays Kate, a typist hired to write notes of congratulations for the upcoming knighting ceremony of Harry Sims (Bryan Fenkart). The incipient Sir Harry turns out to be the husband she unceremoniously walked out on 14 years ago, unbeknownst to his beautiful second wife Emmy (Courtney Reed, underutilized but lovely). She is woman, hear her roar. Or rather, hear the clickety clack of her typewriter, the tool of her emancipation. Perhaps it’ll be the tool of her successor’s emancipation too if Harry doesn’t change his chauvinistic ways.

In Fenkart’s hands, Harry is an oblivious buffoon being blown around by Kennedy’s gale force wind (they spend the play jockeying for position around set designer Edward Pierce’s immaculate London drawing room). A more evenly matched pair might have delivered a complicating dash of romantic tension that’s absent in this dynamic, but the face-off still satisfies the modern appetite for fierce women getting their just deserts. The bigger issue is the play’s oversaturation with 11 musical numbers, which slow the pacing.

There’s a bit more pep in A Sunny Morning, thanks to both a thinner song list and the fizzy pairing of Broadway mainstays Chip Zien and Joanna Glushak. Zien plays Gonzalo, a cranky old geezer who just wants an empty park bench. He resigns himself to sharing one with Laura, rudely interrupting her morning bird-feeding ritual (the London drawing room has given way to the light suggestion of a Madrid autumn). When each realizes the other is an old flame, their game of cat and mouse begins, neither willing to speak the truth aloud. The Gin Game meets The Golden Bachelor, there’s yarn-spinning, wily deflecting, and of course, shameless flirting. It’s a back-and-forth that pops, delights, and even gets some audible “aww”s from the crowd.

Scharf and Calire ultimately give these lovers a neater conclusion than they get in the original text—a way to give the audience one classic happy ending before they step back out onto the cold New York City streets. It’s hard to resist a happily ever after when you can get one, but this instinct to smooth might be what’s taking the enlivening friction away from these sleepy Reunions.