‘Lennon’: The official version

Lennon
Music and lyrics by: John Lennon.
Written by: Don Scardino
Directed by: Don Scardino
Starring: Will Chase, Chuck Cooper, Julie Danao-Salkin, Mandy Gonzales, Marcy Harriell, Chad Kimball, Terrence Mann, Julia Murney, Michael Potts
Where: Broadhurst Theatre, 235 West 44th St.
When: Open-ended run

The past Broadway year has witnessed a small flood of MTV-inspired, juke box-style musicals, each of the devoted to the work, and, in some cases, the life of one or another pop music icon, or, in one conspicuous case, a classic iconic group, no longer functioning among us.
There had been, of course, “The Boy from Oz,” a wobbly effort kept afloat for a year by the power of Hugh Jackman’s dazzling performance as deceased Australian songwriter and star, Peter Allen.
Most recently there was the short-lived “Good Vibrations,” utilizing the fondly remembered music of the Beach Boys, but mainly ignoring the lives of Brian Wilson and his colleagues.
Then there is the still-running “All Shook Up,” a stumbling venture highlighting the musical legacy of Elvis Presley, while ignoring the facts of his complicated and eventually poignant life in favor of a tacky tale of a studly drifter’s impact on the residents of a hick Southern town.
Now there is “Lennon,” with music and lyrics by John Lennon, and a libretto written by the show’s director, Don Scardino. The new show has some of the more annoying aspects of the Beach Boys and Presley productions, namely over-amplified music and, to one extent or another, madly over-energized, essentially hollow performances.
If “Lennon,” which opened on Sunday at the Broadhurst, is marginally better than the other endeavors, it owes everything to the residue of sad fondness which still accrues to the name of Liverpudlian John Lennon, and probably always will.
The “book,” cobbled together by former actor Scardino is a quick trot through the basic facts of the Beatles’ story, with particular emphasis, of course, on Lennon, his dysfunctional Liverpool Irish family, his absent merchant seaman father, his hard-pressed mother, the aunt who actually raised him, and all the rest of it.
What comes as a slight surprise in the show’s early moments is the reminder that, as a bright, unathletic kid wearing Coke-bottle glasses, Lennon’s intellectual acuity made him something of an outsider in the schoolyard and, in a sense, paved the road which eventually led to his emergence as an artist, not to mention his extraordinary self-possession.
Lennon’s first wife, Cynthia, is briefly present, and the fact that she and John married because of her pregnancy is made clear, but there is not a single mention of Julian, the son the union produced, and who has developed into an artist of some note.
The omission is briefly puzzling until one basic fact about the entire effort comes into sharp focus, and which should come as no surprise whatsoever to anyone who has glanced, even cursorily, at the show’s programme.
There, immediately below the credits listing Lennon and Scardino, is a line that provides a skeleton key to the whole operation. “Special thanks to Yoko Ono Lennon,” it reads, with the name rendered in capital letters only slightly smaller than those accorded to her late husband and to the show’s writer-director, who, in the programme’s biographies, is also listed as “conceiver,” a term infrequently encountered in theatrical bios.
In a somewhat sad sense, “Lennon” is altogether the “official,” or “approved,” version of the life and times of the intensely lamented John Lennon.
Ono, whose biography describes her as “one of the leading multimedia artists of our time,” has very clearly had “Lennon” in a hammerlock from the outset, and not entirely, to put it mildly, to the show’s benefit.
To many people who loved and admired the four “moptops” from Liverpool, Yoko Ono will always be blamed for the group’s breaking up, an accusation which probably doesn’t entirely reflect the facts.
The truth, to the extent that there is an identifiable “truth,” would appear to be both more complicated and more evanescent.
Lennon was intellectually restless, and never really enjoyed playing before vast crowds, a point made clear in the show. In addition, he wasn’t always on the best of terms with Paul McCartney, who was it was becoming clearer and clearer, increasingly destined to emerge with a destiny and identity apart from his participation in the Beatles.
By the time the first act of “Lennon” has ended, the Beatles, as a performing and recording entity, are finished.
Yoko, along with Lennon’s efforts to avoid deportation, and the couple’s much vaunted work on behalf of achieving a “peaceful world,” dominates the show after the intermission.
“Lennon” uses a nine-member cast made up of four women and five men, each of whom has a brief turn or two, or more, at “being” the titular character, in a scheme which sometimes puts multiples of the brainy Liverpudlian on stage at the same time, identified mainly by their donning eyeglasses and their attempting a Liverpool accent, with varying degrees of success.
For the most part, the music used tends to be unfamiliar, since, after all, it is entirely the work of Lennon. The most easily recognized song is probably the lovely “Beautiful Boy,” which Lennon wrote when Sean, the son he had with Yoko, was born.
Occurring after the midpoint in the show’s second half, the song, rendered quietly, lyrically and with obvious feeling, is a reminder of what “Lennon” might have been had Scardino and his associates not opted for full-out volume and an alienating intensity of performance style.
Chad Kimball, who recently scored in the Irish Repertory Theatre’s “Finian’s Rainbow,” replacing Malcolm Gets as Ogg, the romantic, lady-loving leprechaun in the final weeks of the show’s long run, comes to “Lennon” from the collapsed “Good Vibrations,” in time to come up with a version of the famous Liverpool na