An Uphill Battle for Musical ‘Masada’

On Tuesday, not long after President Clinton visited Masada, the mountain, the Shubert Theatre hosted a concert performance of the new “Masada: The Musical.”

The show’s creators hope to stage a full production atop the real Masada in Israel during the millennium celebration. They’re also aiming for Broadway and beyond. But they’ve got some rewrites to do first.

“Masada” is based on the story of 967 Jewish Zealots who committed suicide in their mountain stronghold rather than surrender to Roman forces almost 2,000 years ago. There’s potential for a stirring drama here, but you’d never know it from this concert version.

Shuki Levy, who first visited Masada as a fourth-grader, conceived the musical. A movie and TV composer with 15 gold and platinum records, he’s also the co-founder of Saban Entertainment, producer of the “Power Rangers” movies. His score was first heard on a CD recorded a year ago. On Tuesday, as a full onstage orchestra played Levy’s music, it was clear that there had been plenty of trimming and shuffling of musical numbers since the score was recorded.

Levy’s music confidently evokes the grandeur of a Hollywood biblical epic whenever it’s momentarily liberated from the lyrics. But when characters sing--which is during most of the show--the banality and awkwardness of Shell Danielson’s words undermine everything, and Levy’s melodic lines often sound stillborn. The lyrics not only lack originality but also, on occasion, simply have no meaning. For example, a Zealot tells her comrades, “We must make a plan/use our wits/rescind us plightless!” That last phrase appears to exist only as a rhyme for a preceding “sightless,” but at least it really rhymes, which is more than can be said for some of Danielson’s other attempts.

The character who sings that line is Tamar, who goes behind enemy lines and then falls for the Roman general she was planning to kill. Tamar and the general are the most conflicted and therefore the most interesting characters, but even they sing and talk only in cliches. The other characters fare even worse in trying to come up with anything distinctive to say. They’re stick figures in an impersonal historical pageant. Attempts to mine some humor and warmth from the nuptials of a Zealot couple are lame. In the show’s final moments, when not a single Zealot even thinks twice about the mass-suicide plan, it’s obvious that this show’s dramatic impulses are also dead.

At the Shubert, a group of excellent theater singers--including Davis Gaines and Kim Strauss as leaders of the Zealots and Romans (respectively), Valerie Perri as Tamar, Sarah Tattersall as Gaines’ wife and Jordan Bennett and Lisa Guerin as the betrothed couple--stood at microphones, clad in dressy black outfits, directed by Glenn Casale. Theodore Bikel and Rita Moreno narrated. It all seemed light-years away from the grit and agony of Masada. However, at the beginning of the first act, we saw filmed shots of the real mountain, and later, filmed shots of soldiers in period dress fighting one another. It looked almost as if Saban Entertainment had already started shooting the movie version.