It was good to see the dinosaur and woolly mammoth in the Antrobus family’s mid-20th century suburban New Jersey living room again. The creatures are not really threatening—just happy to be there, like their human owners who have implausibly survived thousands of years of war, political upheaval, and environmental catastrophe.
It’s been over three years since Lincoln Center’s ambitious and winning revival of Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play of apocalypse-meets-absurdity The Skin of Our Teeth, which originally premiered on Broadway—mid-World War II—in 1942. Now the Public Theater is mounting Ethan Lipton’s knockout-excellent original musical adaptation, The Seat of Our Pants.
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’s musical highlights of the year, on or off-Broadway.
As in Wilder’s original, the Antrobus’ maid Sabina (Micaela Diamond), is the audience’s guide for a show that spans 5,000 years, but with nary a line appearing on any character’s face. Whatever era we are in (Kaye Voyce’s costumes are astutely designed for all), the characters remain mostly ageless—bar the Antrobus’ children who become adults.
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, “The World Is Ending”), with Mr. Antrobus (Shuler Hensley) expected to materialize from his everyday commute at any moment.
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.
With Daniel Kluger’s 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. It is the end as the world, over and over again, yet still somehow humanity muddles on and persists.
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.
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’s being and how the fight they are staging has gotten a little too real because of off-stage resentments.
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’s 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, “Everybody Loves to Go to Conventions”).
Mr. Antrobus is also hovering on the edge of an affair with a beauty queen played by Diamond (no, she’s not happy playing this bikini-clad homewrecker). As an apocalyptic storm brews—a showcase for Lap Chi Chu’s precise lighting—Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus’ focus on keeping their family together becomes their prime concern.
In the third and final act, the Antrobuses regroup after a period of war (and a baby being born), Diamond back as Sabina keeping the family home in order, and wanting to embrace pleasure (distilled into the song “The Wonderful Thing About Ice Cream”). Two other standouts: Ally Bonino as a charismatically intimidating fortune teller, and Public Theater veteran Ruth E. Sternberg, who makes her performing debut as a production stage manager who has had enough of being the sensible order-maintainer.
Throughout Lipton’s clever, attention-absorbing adaptation the stakes seem huge (quite literally, life, death and the end of the world), but also plain loopy as the scale of upheavals and tragedies butt up against zany oddities and the mundane everyday. “We’re a Disaster” the company sings at the end—a subversively affirming song celebrating the living of life (merrily, defiantly) through all times of turmoil.
