Love is a beautiful liar in “Unknown Soldier,” Daniel Goldstein and Michael Friedman’s gentle musical reverie on the deceptions of Eros and memory. Old-fashioned, mellifluous songs of courtship and marital bliss float beguilingly through Trip Cullman’s carefully assembled production, which opened at Playwrights Horizons on Monday night.
But even at their prettiest, the songs in this multigenerational family portrait seem tainted by suspicion, a sense that the sweetness they extol could dissolve into nothingness, melting “like sugar into water,” as a recurring lyric has it. As for the beloved, those cherished beings who elicit all that enchanted poetry, can you really say you know them, once they’re gone from your sight?
Such reflections of the elusiveness — and illusiveness — of human identity have acquired an unexpected and unwelcome poignancy since “Unknown Soldier” was first staged at the Williamstown Theater Festival, in Williamstown, Mass., in 2015. Only two years later, Friedman, its protean composer, died at 41 of complications from AIDS.
As a consequence, it’s difficult not to see — and particularly hear — this show without perceiving it as a memorial to the man who wrote its music. A character sings hopefully in the opening scene that when we see a picture, or hear a song or read a letter, “a person that’s forgotten comes alive for a moment.” And every note that’s sounded here inevitably both summons Friedman’s presence and makes us all the more aware of his absence.
To regard “Unknown Soldier” primarily as a sentimental work, however, is a disservice to the complexity of this imperfect musical and, above all, to Friedman as a songwriter. Built around the quest to identify the amnesiac World War I veteran of its title, the show celebrates the urge to fully know other people — in the present as well as in the past.
But it is also steeped in a rueful awareness that such attempts are doomed to fail. Friedman has matched that sensibility here with songs that slide from lilting, gaslight-era melodiousness into a jagged, more contemporary anxiety.
The plot is a multilevel, armchair detective story. At its center is Ellen Rabinowitz (Margo Seibert), an obstetrician who has returned to her childhood home in Troy, N.Y., after the death of Lucy, the grandmother who raised her (the incomparable Estelle Parsons, who turns out to be a creditable singer).
At a crossroads in her marriage and career, Ellen finds herself obsessed with a past that Lucy never talked about much. An old newspaper clipping, showing Lucy as a young woman with a mysterious man in uniform, inspires Ellen to do some investigative digging. Most of this is done online, with the assistance of Andrew Hoffman (Erik Lochtefeld), a Cornell University librarian, with whom she initiates an email flirtation.
A cavalcade of ghosts haunts the premises as well. They include Ellen’s 7-year-old self (a charmingly unaffected Zoe Glick), and the dewy young version of her grandmother, Lucy (the silver-voiced Kerstin Anderson).
Then there’s the soldier in that photograph (Perry Sherman, impeccably blank and bewildered), who, having lost his memory, was given the provisional name Francis Grand. He is treated by a psychiatric doctor (an agile and witty Thom Sesma), who, in a bonus for the audience, lectures in vaudeville pastiche numbers about the nature of recollection.
As the narrative shifts between past and present, parallels emerge between the young Lucy’s love for the soldier she never really knew and the developing semi-romantic relationship between Ellen and Andrew — given persuasive, unglamorous existence by Seibert and Lochtefeld — as they hide behind their online personas. Whatever the historical period, it seems, our lovers, and would-be lovers, remain strangers.
As you may have gathered, many strands of plot are being spun here, a process further complicated by the unreliability of our narrators (and implicitly, of all narrators). Sung with conviction and lucidly staged, the production manages admirably to keep confusion at bay.
Still, there’s an abiding sense that the creators have taken on too many elements to fit comfortably into the show’s 90 minutes, with so much to say, in so many voices, in so little time. Even with extensive recent revisions by Goldstein and Cullman, “Unknown Soldier” somehow feels both slender and overstuffed.
But there’s no denying the care that has gone into every level of the production. That includes Mark Wendland’s pale gray, institutional-looking set, presided over by a glowing clock without hands, in which packing boxes morph into twinkling streetscapes; the century-spanning costumes by Clint Ramos and Jacob A. Climer; and Ben Stanton’s lyrical lighting (with gorgeous astral projections by Lucy Mackinnon).
Under the direction of Julie McBride, a five-piece band eloquently mirrors the varied musical languages Friedman uses here. He was always a chameleon composer, with work that ranges from the emo-rock satire of “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” to the R&B-inflected wistfulness of “The Fortress of Solitude.”
Here, he shows a graceful fluency in both the romantic and vaudevillian styles of the World War I era, neatly matched by Patrick McCollum’s period choreography. As immaculately sung by Anderson’s young Lucy, valentines of songs subversively careen off course into darker dissonance, evoking Stephen Sondheim’s pastiche numbers for “Follies.”
For the grown Ellen, he has provided a charmingly wry and understated meditation on dating, in which she reflects that “a milkshake is never a milkshake.” The music that begins the show is disarmingly flat and simple, as the 7-year-old Ellen sings a report on World War I.
The limited range of notes for this just-the-facts presentation will of course prove inadequate to the questions it generates. Friedman’s music subsequently takes off into myriad different directions, which swirl affectingly in their uncertainty.
When Sherman’s amnesiac Francis gropes in song for words and definitions that now elude him, the pang of the unanswerable lingers in his uncompleted sentences. At such moments, it’s impossible not to mourn the uncompleted life and career of a composer who gave such resonant voice to even the unknowable.
Unknown Soldier
Tickets Through March 29 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan; 212-279-4200, playwrightshorizons.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
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