Lincoln Center’s New ‘Camelot’ Is a Thing of Beauty

Permission to spare you the rather exhausting story behind Camelot’s original Broadway production? The short version is this: The show—a musical adaptation of T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, by the lyricist-librettist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe (both previously of Brigadoon, My Fair Lady, and Gigi)—has always been troubled. Despite the obvious talents of its cast, led by Richard Burton as Arthur, Julie Andrews as his French bride, Guenevere, and Robert Goulet as the dashing Lancelot, it opened in 1960 to middling reviews, requiring a dedicated segment on The Ed Sullivan Show (initially meant to celebrate My Fair Lady’s five years on Broadway) to shock its ticket sales to life. This was no fault of the music, which charmed when it wasn’t staggeringly lush; the problem was the bloated book—half medieval pseudo-history, half romantic drama, with a bit of sorcery thrown in just for fun. By the New York Times’s assessment, the work moved “uneasily between lighthearted fancy and uninflected reality,” ending up nowhere in particular. 

All the same, nearly a year after it closed, in January of 1963, Camelot’s own legend was burnished by the endorsement of a recently widowed Jacqueline Kennedy. Homing in on its portrait of a man determined to create a more decent and just society, she soldered the show’s ideals to the brief, shining Kennedy administration for the rest of time. (In Pablo Larraín’s 2016 film Jackie, excerpts from Burton’s “Finale Ultimo” fit right into the already overwhelming Mica Levi score.)

Some of this history is germane to the current revival at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, where Andrew Burnap, Hamilton’s Philippa Soo, and Jordan Donica play the central trio and Aaron Sorkin has rewritten the book. (Bartlett Sher, who has helmed wonderful productions of The King and I and My Fair Lady at the same theater, directs.) Sorkin’s script dispenses with the magical elements, underscoring a reality in which the wealthy glower about the country “changing too fast”—even if, without much proof of it at work, Arthur’s vision of an England defined by justice and civility instead of bloodshed comes to feel more rhetorical than actually actionable. (After all, as Arthur reminds us more than once, the show’s quixotic titular number—what Guenevere archly calls “that stupid song about the weather”—is just a metaphor.) 

The results are not perfect; the first act’s 90 minutes do not fly by. Still, the word “amazing” showed up in my notebook about a dozen times. (Also a single, mysterious “wow.”) On a strictly aesthetic basis—and theater is a visual medium, readers—this Camelot is a total wonder. Its starkly elegant set, framed by soaring arches and animated by painterly projections (Michael Yeargan handled the former and 59 Productions, the latter), actually made me gasp. Sher’s direction is engagingly kinetic, particularly in Act II, and Kimberly Grigsby conducts the 30-piece orchestra with deftness and joie.