A Big Epic Writ Small

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TITLE: ANNA KARENINA

AUTHOR: MUSIC BY DANIEL LEVINE; BOOK AND LYRICS BY PETER KELLOGG

WHERE: BROADWAY

THE BOTTOM LINE: Tolstoy's masterpiece becomes a stage equivalent to TV's Masterpiece Theater.

Anna Karenina makes the case for the smaller-scale musical. It is a modestly produced chamber piece, with a minimal set and an orchestra of seven. What is right with the show all involves just one or two people, notably the first fine rapture of the title character's illicit infatuation with Count Vronsky and the pathetic disillusionment that sends her to her grim fate. What is wrong could not be fixed by any amount of dressing up. Anna is an earnest, intermittently moving but never quite thrilling stage equivalent to PBSs Masterpiece Theater -- lovely gowns, precise elocution and ballroom dancing, with a stately pace, wayward comic intrusions and scant urgency.

Composer Daniel Levine, who has never written a musical before, has yet to develop a distinctive sound: there are stylistic echoes of everything from Blossom Time to Sondheim, although the wistfulness is genuine enough in the title character's Act I showstopper, I'm Lost. Levine's writing partner, Peter Kellogg, also a beginner, deftly focuses the story on Anna's forced choice between romantic love for Vronsky and maternal love for her child by her husband Karenin. But Kellogg nearly wrecks the enterprise with lyrics so blandly generic that they convey hardly any specifics of character -- especially frustrating when the source, Tolstoy's novel, provides some of the most vivid characters in world literature.

Director Theodore Mann and choreographer Patricia Birch, who staged the musical sequences, make remarkably rich use of a nearly bare stage. Ann Crumb, who starred in Aspects of Love in London and on Broadway, makes modest Anna's eruption into passion completely believable and is deeply affecting in her final derangement. Surrounding her are exceptional men: Gregg Edelman as the hapless gentleman farmer Levin, Scott Wentworth as a reckless but wholly admirable version of Vronsky and, most striking, John Cunningham, who overcomes caricatured writing of Anna's estranged husband to reveal a man poignantly wrongheaded and, in his way, as doomed as his desperate spouse.