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Published on 2/15/08
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Is it too early to declare Adding Machine the best new musical of 2008? Perhaps, but I’m going to do so anyhow, and if something better comes along, it will be a great year for musicals indeed. Joshua Schmidt and Jason Loewith’s witty, high-reaching and provocative new work is based on Elmer Rice’s 1923 gimlet-eyed Expressionist classic about the soul rot of conventionality. Its antihero, Mr. Zero (the compelling Hatch), a self-described “regular guy,” is a number cruncher by trade, and the opposite of a free spirit. He is craven, bigoted, sexually repressed and thoroughly incapable of creative thought: a willing cog in the same social machinery that is grinding him to a sandy paste.
Schmidt and Loewith’s adaptation cleaves to the bones of Rice’s play but also fleshes it out in a superbly varied score. Zero’s gossipy termagant of a wife (played by Cyrilla Baer with savage relish and scorn) assails him with shrill, discordant art-song nagging; by contrast, his lovelorn assistant Daisy—in a heartbreaking turn by Amy Warren—expresses her tender affection in a Tin Pan Alley ditty that recalls the bittersweet escapism of Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven. David Cromer’s stylish production, which debuted in Chicago last year, is full of indelible moments: the monotonous drudgery of Zero’s accounting office (which redefines the term “musical numbers”); a prison-cell pas de deux; a dingy umbrella that opens into a glittery firmament of hope. Adding Machine does what Zero literally cannot imagine: It alchemizes mediocrity into excellence.
—Adam Feldman
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