John & Jen

An early work by composer Lippa, who’s since won acclaim for his 2000 version of The Wild Party, John & Jen tracks 40 years in the relationships of a sister and brother, and then the sister and her son. The premisemight very well yield a piece that illuminates social changes while exploring fundamental human connections. John & Jen is not that piece. It resembles nothing more than the product of some lunatic marketing director who has decided to stage a linked series of General Electric ads as a chromatically rich, almost Schoenbergian operetta. The show opts relentlessly for ponderous cliché over nuance: Young brother John’s heart is broken when he learns there is no Santa Claus; later, John and Jen just can’t get along, because he’s a gung-ho Navy man and she’s a Vietnam protestor in bandanna and patched bell-bottoms. When brother John reappears at the end of the second act, singing plaintively of his father’s abusive treatment, “It was my fault: I broke a glass,” it’s like the cherry atop an enormous kitsch sundae.

Apple Tree gamely stages this unpromising material with gusto. As Jen, Carter in particular brings a soulfulness that Lippa and Greenwald’s book sorely lacks; tacking lithely from a sweet melancholy to belting power, she succeeds in making us care about this caricature. Cunningham has to spend a lot of the show playing a child and does so with an eager energy, even if his voice occasionally strains. They deserve better.