For a novel that featured a magic ring that allowed teenagers to fly and turn invisible, Jonathan Lethem’s “The Fortress of Solitude” felt uncannily true to life. This 2003 chronicle of a Jewish boy growing up in a largely African-American Brooklyn neighborhood understood that nothing is ever as simple as black and white.
It’s appropriate that the R&B group that formed part of the soundtrack of the coming-of-age of Mr. Lethem’s ambivalent hero was called the Subtle Distinctions. Whether the subject was music, comic books, graffiti, absent parents or experimental sex, the fine differences in their forms — and our narrator’s painful consciousness of them — made the book an especially authentic-tasting brew.
The Subtle Distinctions surface again in the big-hearted but thin-blooded musical adaptation of “The Fortress of Solitude,” which opened Wednesday night at the Public Theater. I’m referring exclusively to the musical quartet. Subtle distinctions, without the capital letters, are rarely in evidence in this production, which features a book by Itamar Moses and songs by Michael Friedman. Directed by Daniel Aukin, who also conceived the show, this “Fortress” operates mostly on an either-or binary system, as opposed to the more multistranded approach taken by Mr. Lethem. Parallels, contrasts and conflicts are laid out neatly.
Such simplification is perhaps inevitable in translating the indirection of a 511-page novel into the show-and-tell shorthand of a standard-length musical. To its credit, the singing “Fortress” resourcefully juggles different time periods and cultures and characters of different ages without ever blurring those elements. But it does tend to remove their distinctive edges.
And once you strip Mr. Lethem’s plot down to what is essentially a tale of a youthful, destined-to-end friendship between a white kid and a black kid, it starts to take on the easier, instructional sentimentality of an after-school special. “Fortress” doesn’t betray the intentions of the novel that inspired it. But it will make anyone who hasn’t read the book wonder why it generated such excitement.
In some ways, the novel seems a natural choice for musical adaptation. Its central character, Dylan Ebdus (played here by Adam Chanler-Berat), was named for the man who sang “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” and Dylan’s own changing times are reflected in the songs he hears on the radio, the record player and ghetto blasters.
His best friend — and partner in airborne heroics — Mingus Rude (Kyle Beltran), was named for another musical titan, the great jazzman Charles Mingus. And Mingus’s father is Barrett Rude Junior (Kevin Mambo), once the lead vocalist for the Subtle Distinctions. In adulthood, Dylan becomes a music critic who chronicles Barrett’s career, partly as an act of contrition.
In other words, the novel sings to begin with. And Mr. Friedman — a very talented musical multilinguist (the emo-driven “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,” the pop frolic “Love’s Labour’s Lost”) — is eminently qualified to provide the pastiches the show requires.
It’s no surprise that the score here is the strong point. It flows in undulating rivers of soul, funk, punk and rap, with harmonic clashes and convergences of all of the above that are Mr. Friedman’s own. Why, then, does it so often feel underpowered?
The songs are more effective in a gentle, reflective mode — with lovely counterpointing of wistful, individual voices — than when they try to stir or rouse. The production as a whole feels hazy, and it seldom acquires the sweeping momentum that a show about time’s tidal pull demands.
Part of this has to do with the casting. Using Mr. Chanler-Berat, who has made a specialty of anxious and confused lads (“Next to Normal,” “Peter and the Starcatcher”), was a no-brainer. His hesitancy, both angry and apologetic, suits the guilt-knotted Dylan, who lives in Gowanus, Brooklyn, with his father, Abraham (Ken Barnett, who finds the presence in emotional absence), an abstract artist; his free-living mother, Rachel (Kristen Sieh), walked out on them.
But Mr. Beltran is too similarly delicate as the charismatic Mingus, a graffiti master with the tag Dose and the coolest kid in the neighborhood. In this version, Dylan and Mingus are bookends of sensitivity and vulnerability, the same scared little boy under different skins. When they discover that Rachel’s discarded wedding ring allows them to fly, they’re both tremulous with innocent excitement, like the children in “Peter Pan.”
When, in the second act, the grown-up Mingus delivers his criminal résumé in rap, the style doesn’t match the character. But that problem isn’t unique to him. As the bully Robert Woolfolk, Brian Tyree Henry is such a mild-mannered thug that when the nerdy, chess-playing Arthur Lomb (David Rossmer) tries to imitate gangsta machismo, there’s not much comic contrast.
Even André De Shields, a performer who never just walks when strutting is an option, fails to muster in song the gospel fervor required of his character, Barrett Rude Senior, Mingus’s grandfather, a minister newly released from prison.
As his cocaine-numbed, fallen-star son, Mr. Mambo has a compellingly moody voice. But when he performs in flashback and fantasy sequences with the Subtle Distinctions (Britton Smith, Akron Watson and Juson Williams), the numbers lack the razor-edge precision that made such groups so irresistible. (Camille A. Brown did the tentative choreography.) Rebecca Naomi Jones is as appealing as is possible in the Jiminy Cricket role of the grown-up Dylan’s lover and hectoring conscience.
Eugene Lee’s multi-door set brings to mind a hipper, grittier Sesame Street. And it serves its purpose as an uncluttered backdrop for a highly cluttered story.
I realize that telling even a part of Mr. Lethem’s original story requires sacrifice of novelistic nuance. But one of the great things about musicals is that songs can make up for the emotional and narrative slack of skeletal books and dialogue. It’s entirely possible that such fullness lies dormant in Mr. Friedman’s score. As of now, it’s still waiting for the equivalent of a magic ring to enable it to fly.