Review: DADDY LONG LEGS at The Phoenix Theatre Company
The production runs through April 26 at The Phoenix Theatre Company’s Hormel Theatre.
Guest contributor David Appleford offers his perspective on The Phoenix Theatre Company’s production of Daddy Long Legs.
There’s a quiet kind of pleasure in watching two people fall in love through letters, especially when the letters are being sung, and even more so when the singing is this good. Daddy Long Legs, now playing at The Phoenix Theatre Company's Hormel Theatre April 26, is a small, sincere musical that reaches for neither spectacle nor modernity.
Jean Webster’s 1912 novel has already lived a dozen different lives on stage and screen. Silent film star Mary Pickford did it, depression-era Shirley Temple danced around it, and fifties Fred Astaire practically waltzed it into a different plot altogether. But in 2009, playwright John Caird gave it a quieter reincarnation: a two-person musical rooted closely in the original text, content to let the characters speak (and sing) for themselves. It’s as if Caird took a lesson from his previous work on The Royal Shakespeare Company’s adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby: go back to the source. The informal spine of Webster’s novel remains intact, and it turns out to be theatrically shrewd.
The story is pure Edwardian wish fulfillment: Jerusha Abbott, a whip-smart orphan on the cusp of womanhood, is sent to college by a mysterious trustee who demands only one thing in return: she must write to him each month. She must never know who he is. He will never write back. So she writes. And of course, he reads. And, of course, he begins to fall in love.
The device is clever but also constraining. The bulk of the show consists of those letters, her side and his, with songs woven between. Jerusha writes to her anonymous patron, imagining him as a distant, possibly irritable old man. What she doesn’t know, and what we do, is that he’s actually Jervis Pendleton, a young, quietly observant New Yorker who hovers just close enough to watch her evolve. The tension here isn’t melodramatic; it’s psychological, even literary. We’re watching a young woman invent herself on paper while the man she’s writing to edits her life from the margins. Only in the final moments do the two characters actually speak to each other. Until then, they address us, confessional and composed, rather than each other.
There’s a faint whiff of 84 Charing Cross Road in the structure of a long-distance courtship through correspondence, but it comes without the intellectual bite. No one’s terribly wrong or difficult, and the central relationship is telegraphed so far in advance that you stop anticipating the outcome. It can be a little distancing, especially in a format that craves emotion, but it also creates a kind of poetic intimacy. You get used to it, and then, when they finally talk, it lands like the first real breath of air after a long winter.
Carmiña Monserrat is, simply put, luminous. She’s aglow with an earnest sparkle. As Jerusha, she comfortably inhabits her role, bringing warmth, mischief, and a sly intelligence to every line, and delivers the musical’s procession of songs with clarity and ease that seem to rise organically from thought into melody. Liam Boyd as Jervis has the trickier job. He’s not supposed to let Jerusha know he exists, and yet we need to sense him falling for her in silence. He does it with restraint and subtlety, but the chemistry is there, simmering beneath the formality.
Paul Gordon’s score is melodic and heartfelt, if occasionally repetitive. The songs often circle around ideas of books, language, and self-definition rather than simply announcing feelings. It’s less about swelling romance than about the pleasure of articulation. Even the relationship between Jerusha and Jervis feels built on shared intellect as much as attraction; their connection grows in the spaces between the letters, in what is read and what is withheld.
Still, with thirty songs including reprises and only two voices, some numbers begin to blur into one another, and a few could have been cut without much loss. But there are gems. Who Is This Man? and She Thinks I’m Old offer real insight into the characters’ emotional lives; moments where the score deepens the story rather than simply decorating it. Plus, Julian Lamarti’s musical direction is tasteful, as it should be, using only keyboards, a cello, and an acoustic guitar. It’s as if the whole production is wrapped in a kind of musical-theatre cashmere: soft, warm, and exceedingly polite.
Director Chelsea Anderson’s staging is modest, almost minimal, but that seems part of the point. The letters, the books, the gentle shifts in Nathaniel White’s lighting, they’re all tools of a production that trusts its performers and its material. It doesn’t need to dazzle. A handful of Jerusha’s rearranged packing cases suggest shifting locations on Aaron Jackson’s unfussy, simple, yet efficient set design, but also a reminder that the real scenery here is interior. It’s the imagination that does the work. Particularly effective are Connie Furr’s costumes and Avant Johnson’s hair and makeup, which chart Jerusha’s transformation across her college years, from the “world’s oldest orphan” to a poised, educated young woman.
Daddy Long Legs won’t shake your world. It’s not that kind of musical. But for two hours with The Phoenix Theatre Company, it offers the rare pleasure of a story told with care, a romance that unfolds in slow, deliberate strokes, and performances that make you sit up rather than sit back. Stripped of ornament, the piece doesn’t feel smaller, it feels more exact. In an era of overinflated musicals straining for importance, this modest, intentionally dated chamber work reminds you that scale is no substitute for insight.
Ultimately, it may not stay with you long, but in the moment, when you’re hearing the reading of the letters throughout the play, the charm is real. And sometimes, a small story told well can be just enough.
Photo credit: Brennen Russell – L to R: Liam Boyd, Carmiña Monserrat
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