Loving Repeating: A Musical of Gertrude Stein

Concerned that overbudgeted and underwhelming musicals increasingly cater to cheap populist sentiment and an ever-strengthening American anti-intellectualism? Consider Loving Repeating. It sounds nonsensical: “a musical of Gertrude Stein,” a difficult scribe famous for her use of repetition (“rose is a rose is a rose…”). But as Flaherty’s playful score unfolds, it makes absolute sense: Musical repetition, where phrases repeat and reshape themselves, fits perfectly with Stein’s fascination with the musicality of linguistic repetition. Loving only nominally deals with Stein’s life and her lifelong love of Alice B. Toklas. More deeply, it’s about her unabashedly geeky love of language; take the title literally—the love of repeating words.

With a light and precise touch, Galati directs this intimate, 75-minute series of vignettes, which use Stein’s own words, with both erudite sophistication and simple naïveté. In one sparkling highlight, “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene,” a pair of female lovers and a trio of sailor lovers sing the same lines again and again, each iteration revealing a new shade of their longing and jealousy. Backed by smashing performances from Gold as the charmingly cocky older Stein, Mild as younger Stein and Powers as her devoted wife, Galati and Flaherty’s odd and wonderful experiment may leave us scratching our heads, but what a rare treat: a musical that assumes its audience has a head to scratch.—Novid Parsi