Review: New Musical I & You Sings a Story Prosaic

The poetry of Walt Whitman contains multitudes. I & You: The Musical, the teenage romance that improbably centers Leaves of Grass, does not.

Receiving its world premiere at McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, New Jersey, this adaptation of Lauren M. Gunderson’s popular two-hander sputters to justify its musicalization and sags under the weight of its imagined cleverness. Unlike Whitman, who expressed his deepest interior life in verse, this chirpy comedy of puppy love amid adolescent angst stays firmly on the surface level.

So what does the Bard of Camden have to do with a 21st-century meet-cute? If your characters are in high school, it turns out, quite a lot. On an ordinary afternoon, Anthony (Benji Santiago) shows up in the bedroom of his classmate Caroline (Jasmine Forsberg) with a posterboard and a plea: to help him get a passing grade on an English assignment due in a few hours. Anthony, we learn, is earnest but aimless—he’s fallen hard for Whitman’s verse but struggles to synthesize his enthusiasm into a coherent project. Caroline, a talented artist who spends most of her time on social media, holds the key to his much-needed A.

The familiar trappings of romantic comedy are compounded by illness here: Caroline, it turns out, has been absent from school much of her senior year, awaiting a liver transplant after a lifetime of congenital health defects. Anthony arrives as an emissary of a world from which she’s temporarily exiled, a perky counterpoint to her sullen and dejected malaise. Over the course of 90 minutes, they hit all the familiar beats: initial dislike, gradual trust, budding attraction, overwhelming youthful emotionality. It’s worth remembering that Gunderson initially wrote I & You as a play in 2013, and its structure swells with the familiar young-adult tropes of that period.

Then and now, though, the story feels like little more than a compendium of clichés from multiple genres. Sure, teenagers tend to express their feelings in technicolor, but the speed with which Caroline swoons under Anthony’s supposed charms seems a bit too calculated. The disease subplot evokes every movie-of-the-week and after-school special truism you can imagine, and the frequent recitation of Whitman’s own lines exists mostly to add a whiff of intellectualism to what is otherwise a fairly thin and banal script. An 11th-hour plot twist—which I won’t spoil, but which should be obvious to many well before its deus ex machina revelation—only makes the overall proceedings seem even more trivial.

A question to ask of any musical is why the characters are singing rather than speaking. Gunderson and her collaborator, Ari Afsar, have yet to answer that here. The piece unfolds like a production of Gunderson’s play, with songs haphazardly added that neither further the plot nor reveal any depth in the characters. The best of them, like the best of the play, draw on Whitman’s deeply idiosyncratic ear for language (the cheerily metaphysical “Every Atom” is a standout); the rest sound wan and pedestrian. Afsar’s compositional language sounds stuck in the early 2000s rather than reflecting the musical tastes of contemporary teenagers.

McCarter artistic director Sarah Rasmussen has a long history with I & You: She helmed the world premiere of Gunderson’s play at California’s Marin Theatre Company more than a decade ago, before she took the reins of the Princeton venue. I didn’t see that production, but the current staging doesn’t feel any closer to cutting through the kudzu of sentimentalism and tweeness that overflow from the script.

The production also suffers from the sense that no one involved has been a teenager in quite some time. Rasmussen directs Forsberg and Santiago to general performances that linger on one note each—surly cynicism for her and relentless pep for him. Both sing impressively, though the score hardly contains any material worthy of their well-trained voices.

McCarter has spared no expense on this world premiere, a co-production with Maryland’s Olney Theatre Center. Beowulf Boritt’s bedroom set exudes more personality and specificity than the characters themselves, and Japhy Weideman’s expressive lighting gives hints to the situation’s interiority that are often absent from the script. Projections by Stefania Bulbarella suggest the cosmos that Whitman believed every human being contained. Yet even set to music, I & You still seems utterly prosaic.