“Head Over Heels” is a sumptuous, colorful jukebox musical that blends the music of The Go-Go’s and Sir Philip Sidney’s 16th Century Arcadia. The same-sex romance at the center is added, but much of the transvestism belongs to Sidney in the 1500s.
The humor is bawdy and sly and exuberant. Relationships of all kinds abound and treated with the usual conventions of period romantic comedy with many wry quarter-twists here and there. There’s wrestling with a lion!
The central figure is Philanax, the royal fool, who functions as chorus, narrator, and playwright’s proxy. Like a combination of the characters Autolycus and Time in Shakespeare’s ‘The Winter’s Tale’ (though the Oracle in ‘Head Over Heels’ also serves a role similar to Time).
I have a distinct memory of Professor Robert Grudin in an Advanced Shakespeare class discussing ‘The Winter’s Tale” and going into detail on how the character Autolycus was a proxy/metaphor and asked what he represented. Silence. Grudin then prompted with pain in his voice: “He’s a peddler of tales, celebrated for his creativity, a comic and creative character.” More silence. He swallowed and after an inward moment of palpable existential/career despair before the couple dozen of us dullards: “He represents the artist.” The memory of this still makes this dullard laugh, 28 years later.
Notes on the playwright, Jeff Witty. He was an acquaintance in college. Fast forward more than a decade to 2004. I am channel flipping and stop on the Tony Awards. I never watched the Tony Awards. Within a couple minutes, Jeff Whitty takes the stage for winning Best Book for his work on “Avenue Q”. I freak out. Did I mention never watching the Tonys, then this person I recognize is onstage having fucking WON! I go nuts. I call my friend that he dated, enthusiastic that a good guy earned a premiere award. In the decade plus since then, I do watch a few MORE minutes of the Tonys every few years, but that high will likely never be matched.
Jeff continues to do thoughtful, fun work. To my shame, I still haven’t seen “Avenue Q”. Yes, I should because the composer later won a Tony for his work with Trey Parker & Matt Stone on “The Book of Mormon”, a musical I have seen in person THREE TIMES and have listened to the soundtrack about a HUNDRED MILLION TIMES, even dressing like a Mormon missionary for Halloween 2011, then wearing that same costume and posed in front of the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City (making my kids take the photo) in June 2012. “Avenue Q” essentially calls out to me as plainly as possible. Still, hermit-like, haven’t made it.
I was delighted by Whitty’s play “The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler” in 2008. It built on the same lead actress, Robin Goodrin Nordli, as the previous production of “Hedda Gabler” put on in Ashland. “The Further Adventures” resumed with the dead Hedda Gabler simply getting up from the stage she had died on a few years before and we were rolling.
Photo: Jenny Graham.
Two older people next to me left “Head Over Heels” at the intermission, one muttering “Too much. It’s too much.” I smirked. The majority of people stayed. And the majority of people’s spirits stayed high, and it was an older crowd (older than me). Was the adolescent part of me amused by my instinct to sneer and the older folks around me (so, like, 47 years or older) who apparently DIDN’T know that the clapping part of “We Got the Beat” goes clap-clap, clap, clap-clap, clap? Yes. But even without everyone catching that subtlety, the crowd clapped in time.
POSTSCRIPT: I drafted this in 2015 but spaced-off posting it. Since then, “Head Over Heels” got to Broadway. I read a New York Times article about the incoming production, excited this idiosyncratic and bouncy musical by a good person with an English degree from the same fond but mid-level state university I did. All seemed right with the world. Then the article mentioned Whitty left the project before it got to Broadway. No idea why. I live on the other side of the continent and far, far from theater circles. But it was a WTF moment. The Broadway show opened July 2018 and closed January 2019.
Since then, Whitty earned an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for the comedy Can You Ever Forgive Me.
