 Josh Schmidt and Jason Loewith’s Adding Machine is a furious little musical that captures – and makes musical – all the shadowy tones and overtones of Elmer Rice’s Expressionist original. Originally staged in 2007, the musical has been acclaimed around the country, and the Skylight Opera’s production is a sort of homecoming for Schmidt, a composer-sound designer who has been a fixture of the theater scene here for years.
And the Skylight gives the piece its due, offering a stunning visual production that lives up to the play’s expressionist roots. The production at New York’s Cherry Lane Theatre (a transfer from the original Chicago staging) was intensely performed, but physically cramped. Here, set designer Nathan Stuber uses the resources of the Cabot Theater to create some dazzling visual effects – some of which pay homage to Lee Simonson’s legendary designs for the original Theatre Guild production in 1923.
And Kate Buckley’s direction brilliantly realizes Schmidt and Loewith’s darkly comic vision of the struggles of one man against an indifferent world. In Rice’s original, we experience the dehumanizing world of Mr. Zero through his own eyes – his descent into a singular kind of existential madness visible in the shadowy, twisted world onstage.
In the musical, we experience it through his ears as well, as Schmidt renders different elements in Zero’s life in varied musical styles. His badgering and gossipy wife (Liz Pazik) sounds like an Alban Berg anti-heroine, all clash and clang. The dreamy monologue of Daisy (“I’d Rather Watch You,” sung beautifully by Niffer Clarke) is a sweet jazz ballad. Shrdlu (Rick Pendzich), one of Zero’s death-row neighbors, sings for his redemption in a full-throated gospel style, with a praise-Jesus chorus backing him up. And in the productions most striking scene, the litany of spoken numbers in Zero’s accounting office becomes a kind of verbal musique concrete of endlessly inventive rhythms that nonetheless captures the monotony of colorless capitalism.
Ray Jivoff is hardly the hulking lummox of a man you’d associate with Mr. Zero, particularly if you know Jivoff’s charming way around a classic jazz standard. But he is compelling as the earnest but befuddled lead character. For all his rage, Mr. Zero can’t totally shake the conventions of “good behavior” that have seeped into his workaday brain, and Jivoff vividly portrays that anger (in a tour-de-force courtroom scene) and the conflicted desires that keep him from happiness, even as he arrives on the other side of the heaven-earth divide.
Most of all, the Skylight’s Adding Machine shows that it is a story of both past and present. Like the Rep’s recent revival of Death of a Salesman, it shows the singular struggles of an everyman trying to wrest some dignity from the limited pleasures of late-capitalist existence. Adding machines are now quaint symbols of a nostalgic past, but in a world where every human interaction seems reducible to a series of ones and zeros, they are an ominous totem to what we have become.
Photo by Mark Frohna
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