UNLV’s ‘Defying Gravity’ defies odds

I approached Saturday's "Defying Gravity: The Music of Stephen Schwartz" with apprehension.

The Artemus Ham Hall concert -- part of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas' New York Stage & Beyond series -- featured three unknown singers at a top ticket price of $85. The once innovative program, now under the artistic direction of Larry Henley, has grown of late into what feels like a scaled-down, overpriced, financially strapped bus-and-truck tour.

But it's hard to feel shortchanged when the three performers are as electrifying as Julia Murney, Farah Alvin and David Burnham. The audience didn't seem to recognize their names, but many of us went scrambling for our program notes to find out more about them once they started singing.

Schwartz, the composer and lyricist of "Wicked," "Pippin" and "Godspell," demands an equally disciplined measure of traditional belt and understated whisper. His music tends toward showy pop -- the sort of thing Mariah Carey, Diana Ross and Michael Jackson love to record -- and it's not always easy for actors to create specific characters with his sometimes generically pretty lyrics.

Not only were Murney, Alvin and Burnham vocally overwhelming -- they kept hitting notes you didn't know existed -- but their ability to communicate subtext gave the song the pull of a dramatic, often poignant one-act.

Schwartz's oeuvre is not large, so the songs were pretty much what you'd expect, with the occasional unknown number from a flop show thrown in for good measure. (Schwartz has the sort of zealous fans who have made even his flops -- like "Children of Eden" and "The Baker's Wife" -- footnotes in theater history.)

The patter between songs was sometimes a bit too worshipful, but director Gordon Greenberg did an unusually effective job in having the performer give us background information in an entertaining way.

Four onstage musicians were led by Mark Hartman, whom Broadway die-hards recognized as the original associate conductor of Broadway's "Avenue Q."

At evening's end, Murney joked, "You've learned a lot tonight!" and she was right on two counts: We came away with a strong sense of Schwartz's professional bio, as well as a memorable glimpse of how powerful his music can be when talented performers sensitively connect.

Anthony Del Valle can be reached at DelValle@aol.com. You can write him c/o Las Vegas Review-Journal, P.O. Box 70, Las Vegas, NV 89125.