Review: The Wrong Man Suggests a Concept Album Propped Up on Two Legs

Ultimately, it’s the wrong man who animates the stage.

The Wrong Man
Photo: Matthew Murphy

There’s nothing so unusual about the conversion of a concept album into a fully staged musical. Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Chess all began as studio recordings before making the leap to the theater. Ross Golan’s The Wrong Man, however, is a somewhat different story. Though he’s been performing the songs live for nearly 15 years, Golan’s story of an innocent man on death row wasn’t available for purchase or streaming until this year: It’s now been released by Interscope Records, along with an animated movie version that debuted at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, just as the stage adaptation opens.

Golan has penned some appealing acoustic jams, which he performs on the album with disarming ease as he navigates his knotty, often rapped lyrics. But transformations are tricky, and unlike its eminently theatrical vinyl-to-stage ancestors, the show, playing at the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space, just feels like a concept album propped up on two legs.

Down on his luck, Duran (Joshua Henry) picks up Mariana (Ciara Renée) in a Reno bar. Duran envisions a future with Mariana, but she has a psycho ex who’s been busted by the cops for his stash of child pornography. Fresh out of jail, this wicked Man in Black (Ryan Vasquez) goes on a murderous, jealous rampage, then calls the cops after leaving Duran in possession of the literal smoking gun. Unsurprisingly, things go downhill quickly for Duran from there.

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Only Golan, best known as a songwriter for the likes of Selena Gomez and Ariana Grande, appears on the album, performing what is essentially a musical monologue. The stage show features nine performers, and even the hyper-capable director Thomas Kail doesn’t seem quite sure what to do with all those extra people up there. The ensemble mainly looks on, moves benches around the otherwise bare set, and executes Travis Wall’s convulsive choreography, which is sometimes sexy but usually superfluous. There’s also some nice backup singing: The show’s arrangements and orchestrations are by Alex Lacamoire (In the Heights, Hamilton, Dear Evan Hansen), who works his usual crafty magic for a small rock band, animating Golan’s sometimes static harmonies with piano-centric hip-hop licks and Latin percussion grooves.

Not much of substance has changed from album lyrics to sung-through script, but there’s now a sweet but could-be-anyone pillow-talk duet for Duran and Mariana (and did I detect a theater nerd’s reference to Company’s post-coital “Barcelona,” when Duran croons that he’d like to travel to “Paris, New York, Barcelon’”?). Mainly, though, the show is still all Duran, as he sinks into greater and great despondency at his plight from arrest to trial to sentencing.

Golan, who’s white, envisioned himself as the sole performer; original lyrics on the concept album even explicitly reference the narrator as Caucasian. Transposing this story of a corrupt justice system and the execution of an innocent man for Henry, who’s African American, isn’t as simple as altering a few words here and there. Because Golan gives only the faintest outline of who Duran is, or has been, prior to this nightmare scenario, it seems like the character is meant to represent the legions of men, most of them brown and black, who’ve been the victims of the legal system’s injustice. But how many of them have been framed for a double murder (with two weapons in two locations!) by a conniving psychopath (with a clichéd nickname) who planned the setup in meticulous detail? This is no wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time tragedy. And, in a musical otherwise devoid of specifics, this particular eyebrow-raising plot point prevents The Wrong Man from being recognizable as a far-too-familiar story. It’s hard to feel too much empathy when Duran’s experience is both thinly sketched and ludicrous.

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Henry does all he possibly can to fill out that sketch. It’s a passionate, powerfully sung, and heart-broken performance that leaves him drenched with sweat and twitching, as if he has patches of electricity coursing through his body, as Duran prepares for his execution. If only he had a more complex character to work with, as he did for his riveting star turn in Carousel last year. Even with the material in its current shape, Henry would probably be better served performing an un-reimagined version of The Wrong Man as a solo show, free from distractions—even including the splendid, sizzling singing of Reneé as doomed Mariana.

Ultimately, though, it’s the wrong man who animates the stage. A pair of raucous numbers for the maniacal Man in Black as he parties in prison and details his villainy arrive as a welcome relief from Duran’s deluge of angsty ballads. When Vasquez jubilantly crows, “I’m a cold, cold man with little to no pity/I killed my pregnant ex-wife and left for Mexico City” and “I stabbed her in the front cause she stabbed me in the back,” it’s a totally inappropriate betrayal of the show’s serious subject matter and tone. Much worse, it’s completely delightful.

The only other really riveting scene also comes in a rare moment without Duran on stage. As Mariana and the Man in Black survey each other from opposite sides of the stage, two dancers, Tilly Evans-Krueger and Kyle Robinson, fiercely and balletically enact the couple’s last terrifying, violent moments together in a wordless, writhing pas de deux. Fleetingly, The Wrong Man finally feels like it belongs in the theater.

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The Wrong Man is now playing at the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space.

Dan Rubins

Dan Rubins is a writer, composer, and arts nonprofit leader. He’s also written about theater for CurtainUp, Theatre Is Easy, A Younger Theatre, and the journal Shakespeare. Check out his podcast The Present Stage.

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