Landing the rights to produce the musical version of the much loved On Golden Pond play and film was quite a coup for Derby Dinner Playhouse. Ernest Thompson, who wrote both play and screenplay, has now written the musical's book as well as lyrics for composer Roy M. Rogosin's 18 songs. This is the third incarnation for the show, still very much a work in progress after short engagements in New Hampshire and Michigan. Its six-week stay here will allow for a great deal more fine tuning. And it's obvious, despite the warm audience reception and outstanding work by the knock-out cast the Playhouse has assembled, that the musical is not in the same league as the play or film (which won Academy Awards for Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn). The problem is the score, which too often trivializes the lives of the Thayers -- curmudgeonly 80-year-old Norman (Dick Conway), who has alienated nearly everyone except his loving, long-suffering wife Ethel (Rita Thomas) as he relies on caustic comments to stave off his fears of old age and death, and their periodically-estranged daughter Chelsea (Shaune Rebilas), who has taken up with a divorced man with a 15-year-old son after her own divorce.
The musical hews closely to the original story, with the turning point coming for both Norman and Chelsea after the troubled teen stays with the older Thayers while Chelsea and the boy's father tour Europe. Norman and the boy become pals, and Chelsea, in the show's most powerful and affecting musical moment, Something Else to Say, confronts her father about her need for him to love her. Their mutual love then finds full expression. Conway and Thomas are superb in their roles. His Sail Away song and her Still Here solo (which received the most sustained applause), are extremely well done. (But why the derivative titles taken from Noel Coward and Stephen Sondheim?) Other songs, however, are embarrassing in their banality. We're the Thayers attempts to stretch Thayers to rhyme with Delaware. The humor is nonexistent in The Song of the Not Quite Men and condescendingly corny in The Pirates of Golden Pond. And did I really hear Chelsea's boyfriend sing to her father "I love your daughter, she's like hot water?"
