Gil Hates Everything

I really ought not to have liked this show, for the following reasons:

• It’s a coming-of-age story, in which, frankly, nothing happens. Hermie, a teenager on Nantucket island in 1942, is trying along with his two buddies to get anywhere with the local girls, when he is slowly entranced by a GI’s wife living there alone while her husband is on active service. She treats him as a friend while he conceals his love for her, and then her husband is notified as killed. They spend one night together, and then she leaves. That’s literally it. There’s not much in the way of subplots except monitoring the progress of the other two boys, there’s no bad guys.
• And there’s barely any drama. The attempts of the boys to get to second base with the girls are friendly and unthreatening, their bragging harmless, and the girls secretly want them to get to third base anyway. The widow-to-be is happy, even though she misses her man. Hermie has no family problems, no traumas. Scenes are long, focusing on minutiae, sometimes skipping only an hour here and there. It’s not even like the GI dies at the end of act one; that happens about ten minutes before the end of the show. There’s a minuscule cast; three boys, three girls, the woman, a couple of extras.
• It’s not exactly a surprise ending; this is a fairly famous 1971 movie and novel based on a true story, and you can read up on it on Wikipedia. The kid brings the wife the telegram telling her of her husband’s death, and they dance to her favourite piece of music and then spend the night together. In the morning when he wakes up she’s gone from the island. They never met again, except for her making contact once via letter in the 70s to express relief that she hadn’t ruined his life. We know that this is going to happen. With the obvious proviso that this is utterly tragic for her, this show really has no alarms and no surprises.
• It’s very short on full-blown songs. Which, considering it has 41 tracks (including two which were cut), is quite something. I mean, there’s not much you’d extract from the show to sing. Reviewers very charitably described it as Sondheimesque in places, although bizarrely it also sounds a bit like Spelling Bee in others. There are some Andrews Sisters pastiches, which are okay. But for the most part, it sounded very much like a 70s coming-of-age movie somehow converted by a fairly rigid process to a stage musical; instead of dialogue there are musical passages, usually set pretty straightforwardly. There’s a lot of solos or sequential singing. There’s one big group number, the finale in fact, which attempts to draw generic conclusions about how everyone’s lives are shaped by stuff. But that’s all.

And yet.

I think that this is actually a very sweet and in-its-way-hypnotic show. My emotion warning sensor went off fairly early on, registering the slow pace and slice-of-life approach as the calm – the very, very long calm – before the tragic storm. It’s not like I spent the entire show traumatized in advance, but it establishes its mood of innocence quite deliberately and carefully, without taking shortcuts or making assumptions, and by halfway through the second act, the two leads are reasonably real people. It works. It works very well, in fact. It works so well that when everyone started singing the finale, I felt more than a bit irritable that the intense focus on Hermie and Dorothy had been so carelessly discarded in order to make this abstract point which had already been made pretty clearly by the detailed example of the previous two hours.

So even though there’s nothing even remotely cutting-edge about this, and the lyrics are a bit blah, I have to applaud it for picking an unusual aim – to tell a small and apparently unimportant story in convincing detail – and, in my view, absolutely succeeding. It’s a very slow burn, and I’m not sure you’d want to see it more than once, and considering how I probably give the impression that I can’t deal with any show that isn’t powered by amphetamines and acid, you might be surprised that I liked it at all.

And yet… Soppy Old Random Panda is awarding “Summer Of ’42” seven out of ten pieces of bamboo. Never let it be said that I can’t be stopped in my tracks by a well-timed Hallmark Cards sucker punch ;-)

(originally posted 2009)