It was good to see the dinosaur and woolly mammoth in the Antrobus family\u2019s mid-20th century suburban New Jersey living room again. The creatures are not really threatening\u2014just happy to be there, like their human owners who have implausibly survived thousands of years of war, political upheaval, and environmental catastrophe.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s been over three years since Lincoln Center\u2019s ambitious and winning revival of Thornton Wilder\u2019s Pulitzer Prize-winning play of apocalypse-meets-absurdity The Skin of Our Teeth<\/i><\/a>, which originally premiered on Broadway\u2014mid-World War II\u2014in 1942. Now the Public Theater is mounting Ethan Lipton\u2019s knockout-excellent original musical adaptation, The Seat of Our Pants<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n The show, just shy of three hours long (booking to Dec. 7), is crisply directed (by Leigh Silverman), exquisitely performed by a starry, award-garlanded cast, and one of New York\u2019s musical highlights of the year, on or off-Broadway.<\/p>\n As in Wilder\u2019s original, the Antrobus\u2019 maid Sabina (Micaela Diamond), is the audience\u2019s guide for a show that spans 5,000 years, but with nary a line appearing on any character\u2019s face. Whatever era we are in (Kaye Voyce\u2019s costumes are astutely designed for all), the characters remain mostly ageless\u2014bar the Antrobus\u2019 children who become adults.<\/p>\n Michael Lepore, Micaela Diamond, Ruthie Ann Miles, Geena Quintos, and David Ryan Smith \/ Joan Marcus<\/p>\n Feather duster in pocket, it might as well be an ordinary day for Sabina cleaning the house in the fictional town of Excelsior, but it is not. An Ice Age appears to be in full force outside (as the opening song has it, \u201cThe World Is Ending\u201d), with Mr. Antrobus (Shuler Hensley) expected to materialize from his everyday commute at any moment.<\/p>\n With him come desperate people who need warmth and food. Mrs. Antrobus (Ruthie Ann Miles, gracefully inscrutable) treats this unfolding human emergency in her living room with a patiently mild desire for accommodation and efficiency. Like any harried parent she wishes her children, Henry (Damon Daunno) and Gladys (Amina Faye), would just behave and go to their rooms.<\/p>\n With Daniel Kluger\u2019s orchestra positioned on either side of the stage (and sometimes entering the show), Lipton adroitly switches between the registers of comedy, drama, and profundity that Wilder wove into The Skin of Our Teeth<\/i>. It is the end as the world, over and over again, yet still somehow humanity muddles on and persists.<\/p>\n Diamond periodically leaves the confines of the musical to address the audience directly about how strange the story is, how it makes no sense, how we should not believe anything we are watching, and what is happening in the present political and cultural day we know all too well. She also has complaints, as an actor, about performing certain scenes.<\/p>\n Micaela Diamond and Ruthie Ann Miles \/ Joan Marcus<\/p>\n Later, Daunno breaks off from playing an intensely moving climactic scene with Hensley. Just as you wonder which of father or son may die in their Greek tragedy-styled confrontation, Daunno apologizes, seemingly to his fellow actor, for how physical he\u2019s being and how the fight they are staging has gotten a little too real because of off-stage resentments.<\/p>\n The musical revels in such acts of structural sabotage, alongside conventionally exuberant song-and-dance routines (choreographed by Sunny Min-Sook Hitt). Its second act, smoothly mounted on Lee Jellinek\u2019s modest, cleverly transforming set, transports the characters to the Atlantic City boardwalk, with Mr. Antrobus now a political leader (the company breaking out into the toe-tapper, \u201cEverybody Loves to Go to Conventions\u201d).<\/p>\n Mr. Antrobus is also hovering on the edge of an affair with a beauty queen played by Diamond (no, she\u2019s not happy playing this bikini-clad homewrecker). As an apocalyptic storm brews\u2014a showcase for Lap Chi Chu\u2019s precise lighting\u2014Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus\u2019 focus on keeping their family together becomes their prime concern.<\/p>\n Damon Daunno \/ Joan Marcus<\/p>\n<\/span><\/div>\n
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