It’s easy to get lost in a big city. If you’re the semi-creepy guy in 4-B hoping no one clocks you as an alien life form dispatched to Earth to save humans from peril, that’s probably an advantage. In Superhero, at Second Stage, Oscar-nominated playwright and screenwriter John Logan, whose stage work includes Red and Peter and Alice, and Tom Kitt, whose music in Next to Normal won him a Tony, have fancified a sweet, slight musical about grief and urban alienation with occasional flashes of blammo!
Comics nerd Simon (Kyle McArthur) lives with his literature professor mom, Charlotte (Kate Baldwin) in some unnamed metropolis. They’re both mourning the loss of Mitch, Simon’s dad, who died two years ago in a mysterious accident. Simon likes to draw superheroes, an obvious coping mechanism. (Beowulf Boritt’s set builds the proscenium into a series of panels.) He retains the childlike belief that maybe real heroes exist, a belief that’s unexpectedly strengthened when he sees his taciturn neighbor Jim (Bryce Pinkham) dematerialize into a burst of light and whoosh from the building’s roof.
“I’m from another planet,” Jim explains later. “OK, it sounds crazy when I say it out loud.”
Another musical might keep us guessing as to whether Jim is really super or just a reserved dude with possible schizophrenia, whether Simon is really an accidental sidekick or just a messed-up kid who should really be in therapy. Tom Kitt’s earlier musical, Next to Normal, played some of these hallucinatory games. But this show is basically unshakable on the subject of Jim’s extraterrestrial origin. It’s more interested in whether a capeless crusader can rescue a heartbroken family. It turns out of course the real power isn’t superspeed or superstrength. It’s love. Wait, was that a spoiler?
Maybe the superhero stuff is a little silly, but silliness is not the enemy here. If anything, it saves Superhero from sounding like a softer echo of so many other unhappy family stories. (The echoes of Dear Evan Hansen, another tale of an awkward depressive teenager and the mom who can’t reach him, are especially strong.) Can we maybe acknowledge that when it comes to that whole happy/ unhappy family thing, Tolstoy was very wrong?
Still, the rescue only goes so far. Too many of Kitt’s songs, outfitted with somewhat sentimental orchestrations by Kitt and Michael Starobin, do the same work. They’re nearly all ballads, charting emotional micro-climates inch by inch. Kitt writes beautifully for his anguished characters, shaping the lyrics to each distinct voice. But there are only so many this-is-what-I’m-feeling-right-now-this-second songs a musical can hold, especially when the plot is so wispy and the conclusion, that maybe mother and son can work things out if they only talk to each other, so foregone.
Non-stop quiet ballads liberate Superhero from much of what makes musicals embarrassing, but also from much of what makes them fun. The direction by Jason Moore is thoughtful and the musical staging by Lorin Latarro beautifully fluid. And yet would it be so bad to have a tap number? Instead the mood remains low-key somber and Logan’s book takes Jim and his powers so seriously that there’s no opportunity for wonder or playfulness. Pretty much the only jokes are about mini golf, fruit so low it scrapes the ground.
Pinkham has a lovely, chilling tenor and if the musical rests too heavily on Simon’s puny shoulders, McArthur is likable, especially in his zero-to-hero-to-zero song I’ll Save the Girl. (If the other actors are pleasant enough, their characters are comic book thin.) But this musical mostly exists as an exquisite showcase for Kate Baldwin, an actor so luminous and so specific that she makes great singing seem effortless. Is that a superpower? It should be.
