Entertainment

Review: A Song of Eternity in ‘Midnight at the Never Get’

NEW YORK — In the glamorous little corner of the afterlife that Trevor Copeland built, heaven is a nightclub stage. Bathed in hazy purple light, it has a piano at the ready and a five-piece band to back it, because what kind of paradise doesn’t include a horn section?

Posted Updated

By
Laura Collins-Hughes
, New York Times

NEW YORK — In the glamorous little corner of the afterlife that Trevor Copeland built, heaven is a nightclub stage. Bathed in hazy purple light, it has a piano at the ready and a five-piece band to back it, because what kind of paradise doesn’t include a horn section?

Trevor is a singer, and in the wistful “Midnight at the Never Get” — the lushly romantic if clunkily titled new musical by Mark Sonnenblick, directed by Max Friedman at the York Theater Company at St. Peter’s — he has been here a long while, polishing his act. This is the way he chooses to spend eternity: inside a cabaret show made up of songs that he and the love of his life, Arthur Brightman, performed back in the 1960s at a Greenwich Village gay bar called the Never Get.

Such are the perks of being dead. “You get to pick a memory,” Trevor tells us. “Make a little house out of it. Hang the walls and rough the floors with all the detail you have left. And then you stay, as long as you like, in your infinite moment, where you can be just like you were.”

Or, more to the point, the way you wish you’d been. Played by Sam Bolen, who conceived this small treasure of a show with Sonnenblick, Trevor is an irresistible charmer — a tenderhearted, irrepressible imp with a puppyish winsomeness. Arthur is less extroverted, more suave, but they have a flirtatious chemistry from the moment they meet, in 1963.

Soon Arthur, an ambitious composer at the start of his career, is writing love songs for Trevor to perform, and stubbornly refusing to change the lyrics so they’ll pass as straight. But he’s also turning out American Songbook-style tunes in a folk-rock age. He is in some ways deeply traditional.

As the gay-rights movement takes shape around them, Arthur vehemently wants nothing to do with protests. His defiance is in his art, performed at a gay club at a time when those were illegal — and also in his life, as a gay man in love with another man, which could get them arrested or worse.

But the guy we see at the piano, re-enacting their relationship with Trevor, is not actually Arthur. He is The Pianist (Jeremy Cohen), Trevor’s bright, bruised remembrance of the man he cherished the most. The handsome show that Trevor has been prepping (choreography by Andrew Palermo, costumes by Vanessa Leuck, lighting by Jamie Roderick, set by the ingenious brothers Christopher and Justin Swader) is for Arthur to step into, once he arrives. If he arrives.

Sonnenblick’s music, beautifully orchestrated by Adam Podd, strikes that elusive balance between fresh and period-familiar, and the lyrics are lively. There’s only one jarring anachronism, a reference to the emergency number 911, that can’t quite be explained away. Otherwise this smartly constructed show is utterly transporting — and, for all its romance, frank about the bigotry and shame that gay men faced in that era.

An intimate, aching chamber musical about heartbreak and bliss, “Midnight at the Never Get” is about bravery, too. And about the kind of battered hope that refuses to die, even after death.

Event Information:

‘Midnight at the Never Get’

Through Nov. 4, York Theater Company at St. Peter’s, 619 Lexington Ave., Manhattan; 212-935-5820, yorktheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

Copyright 2024 New York Times News Service. All rights reserved.