'Baby' by Actors Theatre Company: Baby, listen to your papa, this is a show with heart
So here's a sweet and surprising little “Baby.”
With its pop-Broadway score and three generations of loving but struggling couples all trying to conceive in a college town, this 1983 musical with a score by Richard Maltby Jr. and David Shire is not exactly on the edge of musical theater. Indeed, a lot of theaters considering a production of “Baby” end up adopting another title after figuring out that the central premise of the show — from a vanished era when small, conceptual musicals were in vogue — was itself conceived in a time when today's fertility treatments were barely out of the bassinet.
But I've long been among this musical's unrepentant fans. I've been known to roar down the interstate with the gloriously affirmative Act 1 anthem, “The Story Goes On” (as spectacularly recorded by Liz Callaway), belting from my car speakers. “And all these things I feel and more,” I would sing, as mile markers flashed by. “My mother's mother felt and hers before.” I've always had respect for a song that worked “primordial sea” into its lyrics.
But all that was before I had easily embarrassed kids, who don't like anything involving the word “baby.”
But their papa says “Baby” has a knockout little score. Aside from the best number ever written for a pregnant character — a small category, I know — “Baby” also features the boppy “I Chose Right” (which I've heard at a few weddings over the years), the faux-disco “Two People in Love” and “I Want it All,” which has an especially wise and beautiful bridge.