NEW YORK — Just weeks after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, his grieving widow Jackie Kennedy quoted her late husband’s favorite Broadway musical in an interview in Life magazine: “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.”
This was an act of brilliant mythologizing, and it stuck: JFK’s short, tragically curtailed administration became cemented in the American mind with Arthurian legend and thus with justice, kindness, chivalry, eloquence and romance.
Had Jackie Kennedy seen the revival of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s “Camelot” now at Lincoln Center — with book by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Bartlett Sher, with Andrew Burnap as King Arthur, Phillipa Soo as Guenevere and Jordan Donica as Lancelot — she’d hardly have chosen such a connection. This 2023 “Camelot” has more the nihilistic ambiance of “Game of Thrones” than a White House filled with art. It’s the chilliest “Camelot” you ever did see, and it embodies so many of the current neuroses surrounding revivals of classic American musicals.
These include unease with sex (the barely danced “Lusty Month of May” number is about as sexy as January wind chill); fear of the narrative dominance of a handsome, confident, heterosexual male, which means that Donica gets heavy eyeliner and Burnap, for all his talent, comes off as a less-than-effectual wimp half the time; and, above all, a profound distrust of the ability of people in power, like kings and queens and presidents, to do the right thing.
Such a view is perfectly valid, but begs the question: Why are you reviving “Camelot” if not to cash in on an audience expecting something completely different?
Sure, gorgeous songs like “If Ever I Would Leave You” and “I Loved You Once in Silence” are there, and technically well sung with the underpinning of Lincoln Center’s typically fine orchestra, but they are shorn of belief because the production keeps running scared of love.
Instead, we get a focus on Arthurian flaws (and American ones by metaphoric extension), rather than Arthurian possibility. The Knights of the Round Table don’t even get a table, at least not one you can read on a set from Michael Yeargen that seems to eschew any kind of permanence. The dominant visual is an empty stage.
At the end of the night — and notwithstanding whatever changes you might want to make to the 1960 worldview — what really matters is that the audience believes in the love of Arthur and Guenevere because it is a stand-in for American democratic values.
Here, you just don’t. That’s partly because neither one seems vulnerable to the charms of the other, and also because they appear to be in different worlds. Burnap, for example, leans into the contemporary while Soo has a stylized, royal-like accent and delivery. Her work is more traditionally “Camelot,” but hardly au fait with the rest of this show.
And Donica, the most successful of these three and the only one who really blows out the thrilling score, seems very much in a fantasy world. His Lancelot is not so much a disciplined, sexual option for Guenevere that she needs to avoid (albeit with difficulty the audience understands) as a fascinating visitor from another galaxy.
Things in the show go especially haywire in Act 2, when Arthur’s old lover Morgan Le Fey (Marilee Talkington) enters the action. Sorkin’s new book sees her as smarter and even more prophetic than Arthur, which fights the show’s original dramaturgical structure like mad. But even if you buy that idea, it gets lost in an ambitious, split-screen kind of sequence in Sher’s production that completely loses the thread of the action and confuses the audience.
And after that, the show can’t recover, even with its famously emotional ending. Here Lerner’s brilliantly written finale feels merely rote, which, frankly, tears at the heart of anyone who deeply loves this masterpiece.
The production is a victim of its times and the deeply troubling, increasingly settled Broadway wisdom that you cannot just do these older musicals and trust the audience to put them in the context of their times, but that instead you have to render them palatable for the moment. Which means adding political cynicism, mental confusion, fear of sex and a demonstrated distrust of American exceptionalism, even allowing for its human failings, which Broadway always, always did.
You can try. But evidence suggests it’s better to write a new musical.
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At Lincoln Center Theater-Vivian Beaumont, 150 W. 65th St., New York; camelotbway.com.
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