Unpolished, revised “Waiting” still shines bright

Let’s get one thing out of the way: Waiting, a song cycle by Bob Kelly and Kelly Pomeroy, is a very good musical. It’s all the more admirable in context: While it was first performed while Kelly and Pomeroy were students at St. Olaf’s College, they’ve radically reconfigured it for The World’s Stage Theater Company, who will be taking it to make its Off-Broadway debut at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York City this June.

The problem is that Kelly and Pomeroy are so focused on driving home the central message of the play – stop waiting for the right moment and take that chance on love or life – that Waiting is making the leap unpolished. As it stands, the show is strong enough to stand alone in performance, but its individual pieces have a great deal more potential than the duo and World’s Stage have managed to unlock.

Take its cast. While the original production had ten actors paired off into five couples, director JC Clementz and World’s Stage artistic director Gretchen Mahkorn have trimmed it down to nine roles – that extra forms a trio, not a lonely solo.

But while World’s Stage has assembled a cast of talented actors/singers to play those nine parts, they don’t have equal weight, nor have all of them been fully realized.

That trio (Doug Clemons, Anna Cline and Ryan Cappleman), formed by fusing two of the original draft’s storylines – a couple who breaks up on the way to the altar and a gay couple with conflicting personalities – has the narrative weight of two storylines but only half wraps up each.

Likewise, it was smart to change the two co-workers unwilling to admit they’re in love (Robby McGhee and Mahkorn) into teachers to better tie them to the remaining couples – Sally Staats and Cleary E. Breunig as two teenagers in unrequited love and Joel Kopischke and Mara McGhee as Breunig’s character’s parents, chafing in their marital roles. But that change doesn’t really do much for their story, thinner than the rest.

And then there’s the show’s music, a score music director Colleen Schmidt described in an interview earlier this week as “a little bit Ben Folds, a little bit Jason Robert Brown.” It’s a comparison that pretty much checks. Mahkorn’s killer solo “Count on Me” (a new addition to the score) is practically radio-ready, and Staats and Breunig’s first duet, “He Bumped Me,” has the foundations of a classic Broadway number and the lyrical ornamentation of any high school classroom.

They join a collection of three or four other tunes – including Clemons and Cappleman’s duet, “What the Hell,” the show’s best musical example of the tension “waiting” can create, “Where’s the Milk?,” a sort of Sondheim-lite argument between Kopischke and Mara McGhee as they get their kids ready for school, and “Better Than This,” Cline’s triumphant solo and the only song in the show that gave me honest-to-God-this-is-It goosebumps – that stand out from the crowd.

Many of the rest feel like permutations of the same tune, with similar melodic lines, the same unstoppable, mile a minute, off-beat-less rhythm and a penchant for cramming in more words and syllables than a verse can handle for fear of having to break into dialogue. Frankly, some earlier songs could have used a little dialogue or light recitative, to make the expositional needs easier for the cast to bear and audience to pick up on. Yet even the least developed songs in the cycle are well-crafted by Kelly and Pomeroy, and that gives this cast the chance to make them shine in the way a lesser group might not be able to.

So maybe this is the right time for World’s Stage to take the leap after all. Waiting isn’t quite the musical it could be, but there’s a bravery to it that might just be enough.

Waiting will run this weekend only at the Tenth Street Theatre, through May 26. Tickets are $15, $12 for students, and can be purchased online.