[Caution: SPOILERS!]
If you’re a theater person anywhere near my age, there’s a good chance that you have strong feelings about Stephen Schwartz and Roger O. Hirson’s famous Bob Fosse musical Pippin. I’m one of the folks who love it, but for many, the mere mention of the fey, pop-tune-driven faux medicine show prompts violent eye rolling.
Why is this? I think it’s because the show became both a victim of its time and a victim of its own popularity. It was, after all, the first Broadway musical to employ television advertising, and it ran on Broadway for six years. But the warm, catchy tunes developed arthritis after too many bad high school and college and community theater 
productions. After too many young j
uveniles auditioned with “Corner of the Sky” or “Extraordinary” (guilty!). As one of the shows boosters, this has always made me sad.
Perhaps one of the reasons the show hasn’t aged all that well is that so many of the numbers depend on irony. Very few of the songs in Pippin are about what they are actually about. If you know what I mean. Fastrada’s “Spread a Little Sunshine” is about spreading chaos, not love. “Glory” is about how awful war is not how glorious it is. “Extraordinary” is really commenting on a clueless young man’s inflated sense of his own importance. And “With You, ” a beautiful love ballad that I actually sang in my big sister’s wedding, is about an orgy. Good irony isn’t that easy to pull off, and when it gets tired it can devolve into a deadly coyness.
That’s why the current tour version of the Broadway revival version of the American Repertory Theater’s reimagining of Pippin is such great news.
On paper, I don’t like the high concept ART used: Basically, a Cirque du Soleil Pippin. I cringed at the thought. I remember how much I dislike that concept when I’ve seen used in various disappointing productions of Bernstein’s Candide.
But somehow, it works.
