Wings.

I went to Wings at the Joseph Papp Public Theater with more curiosity than anticipation. It had been enthusiastically received at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and it carried its reputation with it to New York. Still, I am suspicious of musical adaptations of straight plays, particularly of plays that I admire as much as I do Arthur Kopit's original Wings. It is difficult to realize that it has been almost fifteen years since Wings first played in New York because the play and Constance Cummings's luminous performance as Emily Stilson are still vivid in my mind. (I hate critics who describe performances as luminous, but Cummings's really was.) I did not want music to soften or sentimentalize Kopit's tight, clean, lyrical account of Emily's stroke, her struggle to reassemble the verbal fragments in her mind, and the strangely exhilarating final vision that was her death. I might as well have left my misgivings at home, for the new musical has much of the power of the original.

Kopit, who has turned his hand to musicals on occasion (Nine and the non-Webberian Phantom), seems to have done nothing with this adaptation except provide the source. That is a major contribution since Arthur Periman, who wrote the book and lyrics, sticks close to the structure, the intention, and often the words of the play. Periman and Jeffrey Lunden, who did the music, have worked together for years, but there is nothing in their credits to prepare one for the quality of Wings. The music and the sound design by Richard Woodbury provide the disorientation that signals the stroke and then the transitions in and out of intelligibility for Emily. In this, they are working rather as music (Herb Pilhofer) and sound (Tom Voegeli) did in the original Yale Repertory production of Wings which, like the Goodman musical, found its way to the Public.

This Wings, true to its genre, has songs, set musical numbers. For the most part, they serve both the play and the musical. Working from a brief exchange in the original play, Lunden and Periman have written a yum-yum-yummy song for the nurse, who, like too many nurses, treats her patient as a child, trying to coax her to eat while the inarticulate Emily is not yet able to shout her horror. It is a comic scene, but as Ora Jones plays it, descending on Emily like a benign harpy, the song is as fright-ening as it is funny. In another song built on a scene from the original, Billy (Ross Lehman), one of the therapy group, sings a repeated verse about his cheesecake recipe, each time ending with a mispronunciation until he finally succeeds in correctly saying/singing "cheap." If he seems a bit too articulate in the verse itself, we can accept it by remembering how another Billy (in the opera Billy Budd) could musically transcend his stammer. Besides, Billy's triumph is shared by the group, and it is a comic variation on the excitement Emily feels when she gets a word right--as in the charming duet with Amy, her therapist, in which she remembers the name for snow.

The most interesting change that the musical works on the play comes at the beginning when Emily suffers her stroke. In the play, she is sitting reading, and it is the variation in the ticking of the clock that provides the sound indication (there is a light and shadow signal too) that something is happening in her mind. Here she puts an old record on the wind-up victrola, a song that was used to introduce her and her family when they were barnstormers, bringing their aviation act to fairs, and she was a wing-walker (in the musical, as in the play, wing-walking provides the metaphor for what she is undergoing). The cheerful, tinny song is doctored into incomprehensibility as the stroke attacks her, and it recurs in various forms and to good effect all through the musical.

Although the secondary characters in Wings are important to the texture of the piece, the role of Emily is the heart of the musical as it was of the play. Perhaps because the role is so demanding, two performers share the part. I saw the piece at a matinee, which is when Rita Gardner plays Emily, and a very impressive Emily she is. Take out your original cast recording of The Fantasticks (doesn't everyone have a copy?) and listen again to the very young Rita Gardner, insouciant as The Girl in the first act, petulant in the second. The charm of that Gardner is in evidence in some of the scenes in Wings, tougher now and not for a moment winsome, but time and experience and a strong part give Gardner the force and intensity that Emily needs. If the final scene does not work as well for me as it did in the play, it is not Gardner's fault. Oddly, the music undercuts the beauty of Emily's last long speech, insisting that this is the big aria, where Kopit's spoken words-in Constance Cummings's mouth simply engulfed the listener. If you share my memory of the original Wings, there is still time to test it at the Public; if you do not, there is still time to win your own Wings.