COMIC AND KEYBOARD CHOPS? Tom Frey and Richard Carsey have both. |
At least the cast of 2 Pianos 4 Hands doesn’t try to play Chopin. Oh, the actors perform the “Raindrop” Prelude in D-flat and then the Rondo in C for two pianos, with particular attention to how many appendages to apply to the arpeggios. But nobody is trying to embody a great musician at the keyboard. Instead, Richard Carsey and Tom Frey, who make up the cast of 2 Pianos 4 Hands at Merrimack Repertory Theatre (through January 27), portray the award-winning theater piece’s co-creators, Canadian actors/playwrights Ted Dykstra and Richard Greenblatt, who for the work’s first 750 performances portrayed themselves: talented childhood musicians who must face the reality that, no matter how hard they “practice, practice, practice,” they will never get to Carnegie Hall.
Lightweight but charming, 2 Pianos 4 Hands has traveled the world since its 1995 Toronto debut, coming as close to Boston as Hartford Stage and the Cape Playhouse. Carsey and Frey, who are precisely directed at MRT by Greenblatt, have served as the pianistic authorial alter egos at five regional theaters as well as at the International Keyboard Festival in Michigan. And no wonder they’re recidivists! There can’t be that many performers who have both the comic and the keyboard chops for this work, which features 24 musical pieces (most of them classical, though “Great Balls of Fire” makes an illegal inroad) and more than a dozen characters, mostly the parents, music teachers, examiners, adjudicators, and gangly duet partners who were Dykstra & Greenblatt’s high-pressure companions on their separate roads to non-stardom on the concert stage.
At MRT, seated at dueling Yamahas, the deadpan Carsey and the more elastic Frey — whose resemblance to Tom Smothers heightens the comedy-routine aspect of the work — prove accomplished pianists, applying their one, two, or four hands to staples of the Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Schumann repertoires, not to mention “Heart and Soul” and “My Way.” The music is so much a part of the show that one is frustrated not always to know what’s being played. Since the pianos are backed by large gilded frames used as scrims and projection screens, why not also use these as programs?
At the same time, Carsey and Frey evoke a couple of competitive piano geeks stuck on their benches, torn between boredom and bravado, “staring at little black dots, developing hemorrhoids.” Mostly, these two mature performers play Dykstra and Greenblatt between the ages of 10 and 17, so a little cuteness is inevitable. The piece invites it; in only a couple of vignettes invoking coercing dads does it push beyond comic caricature. But while being consistently entertaining and teaching some rudiments of music, 2 Pianos 4 Hands does convey the loneliness of the long-distance prodigy. No group sports for these guys — unless you count the flicking and slapping that goes on (while laying into one of Mozart’s sonatas for one piano, four hands) between two 11-year-olds sentenced to play together for a competition.
In the beginning, 2 Pianos 4 Hands seems a thing made for Marcel Marceau and Victor Borge. The two performers enter in black or white tie and tails, only to descend into a frantic, silent miscommunication that involves swapping pianos, then benches, before turning Bach’s D-minor keyboard concerto into a rapidly breaking-down musical spat. Things get more harmonious: a few rapid-fire crescendos of dialogue are as musical as the ivory tickling in this pianistically punctuated music lesson/anecdotal demonstration of the insular lives of young artists aiming for greatness and having to settle for less. (Dykstra is turned down by the conservatory of his choice, whose pooh-bah finds his playing facile; Greenblatt is shown the door by jazz faculty.) 2 Hands 4 Pianos is a little like an avuncular, less fiery Amadeus without the title character, in which no one even gets to be Salieri. It ends with its piano men back at their stations for the Bach D-minor concerto, this time offering a cohesive and satisfying rendition before rising to the sound of many hands clapping.
