"Martin Guerre" has come back from the musical theater wars and, like the title character, is looking somewhat transformed. Tighter, clearer, the latest Alain Boublil Claude-Michel Schonberg Cameron Mackintosh collaboration bears evidence of creators, notably a gifted new lyricist in Stephen Clark.

“Martin Guerre” has come back from the musical theater wars and, like the title character, is looking somewhat transformed. Tighter, clearer, and in the case of leading man Iain Glen far better acted than it was in July, the latest Alain Boublil Claude-Michel Schonberg Cameron Mackintosh collaboration bears evidence of creators, notably a gifted new lyricist in Stephen Clark, who have taken seriously the overwhelmingly negative reviews from the summer and gone back to work with the diligence of the villagers of Artigat.

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Is that enough to save a show in trouble? On this point, the verdict is still out. The fact remains that all that is now good in “Martin Guerre” shows up even more starkly a lugubriousness that just won’t budge. With all the best intentions in the world, there exists an intractability to the material as here conceived for the stage that keeps an honorable show from ever becoming an affecting one; for all that Nick Ormerod’s set is busy moving think Robin Wagner’s “Dreamgirls” design gone rustic (and rather dreary) the show itself rarely is. The newfound lightness in “Martin Guerre’s” step can’t conceal a heavy, not to mention ponderous, heart.

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If anything, the show now carries unexpected echoes of “The Crucible,” and not just because I saw the revamped musical the same week as Nicholas Hytner’s bruising film of Arthur Miller’s play. There’s a John Proctor-ish gallantry to Glen’s Arnaud du Thil, another man of conscience who would die rather than live a lie, consumed by thoughts of betrayal, amid an environment of mounting hysteria and intolerance. It’s only too bad that, as before, Glen has such an unequal partner in Juliette Caton’s Bertrande, who blankly greets the actor’s most impassioned outpourings during “Tell Me to Go,” for instance. (Caton is sharing performances with Rebecca Lock.)

Spearheaded by newcomer Clark, whose lyrics have few of the rent-a-rhyme characteristics of Edward Hardy’s originals, the first hour or so benefits most from the changes. While a new opening song, “Working on the Land,” establishes the ethos of a peasant community bound to the soil, we see far more lucidly the three-way tension between the real Martin (Matt Rawle) forced into marriage within a village he hates; Guillaume (Jerome Pradon),the lustful malcontent; and Bertrande, who is unfulfilled by either man. Still struggling to elicit laughs though now placed later in the act is “Sleeping on Our Own,” the putative comic number for the town’s three resident crones: Artigat’s own first wives’ club. The contrasting figure of pathos, the village fool Benoit (Michael Matus), is marginally less irksome than before.

If the specifics of the sectarian conflict remain opaque how, exactly, is the delivery of Bertrande’s child going to protect the land from encroaching Protestants? that backdrop at least seems integrated into the story, rather than superimposed in an effort to give “Martin Guerre” the social dimension that arose naturally out of “Les Miserables” and “Miss Saigon.”

No musical, though, is ever solely about plot, and streamlined though the narrative now is, “Martin Guerre” doesn’t make that essential connection with an audience that might generate a real lift, or induce the (often scenically driven) highs of the British mega-musicals that have preceded it. On the latter point, I applaud the creative team’s ongoing attempt to ground the musical theater once again in character, and wonder how this show might look in a fully stripped-down version that would release its Britten-ish aspirations. (Notably, it’s the big act-two set piece, the razing of the village, that prompts director Declan Donnellan’s clumsiest staging.)

This production does prove, as the show’s own lyric puts it, that there’s more to “Martin Guerre” than just a name. But as those toiling Artigat townspeople would be the first to tell you, there’s still work to be done.

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Martin Guerre

Prince Edward Theater; 1,622 seats; 32.50 ($50) top

  • Crew: Reviewed Nov. 11, 1996.

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