Stalk

The evident talent involved in the new musical Stalk makes its shortcomings all the more frustrating. This Jack and the Beanstalk retelling follows a young man who hears the fable of Jack at a circus fair and then begins to imagine (or experience) his own boozy, brawling parents as characters in the tale. Pretty soon, real world and fantasy merge to the point of conflation.

The production is anchored by Jordan Phelps—a male ingenue with Great White Way chops—who, as Jack, sustains much of the show with pleasant vocals and a nimble, appealing physicality. Strong puppet work from the evidently Blair Thomas–inspired Mike Oleon provides a consistent, creepy backdrop for the show’s several impressive performances. His multi-pieced depiction of a giant, for example, provides an imposing, ingenious solution for how to make a normal-sized man loom large.

Regrettably, these considerable assets can’t make up for Gawrit’s ponderous, angsty and overlong script. The lyrics tend toward the simultaneously redundant (“this is my story / this is how it goes”) and inane (“about a boy named Jack / and his dread and woes”). Over two and a half hours, the playwright never tires of depicting screechy domestic battles.

Perhaps most problematically, the play never establishes a coherent relationship between Jack’s fantasies and the real world. At the top of Act 2, for example, Jack and his girlfriend enter hand-in-hand to “Dreamland.” Several scenes later, she reacts with horror when he asserts that his father is a giant. Has Jack retreated into his imagination, or has fantasy overcome the real world? Midway through this protracted piece, we stop caring.

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