Penelope Review: Adrift Between Ithaca and Progress – The New York Times

Hope to see you soon, she has him sign off, affectionately. Your Odysseus.

Directed by Emily Maltby for the York Theater Company, with music direction and orchestrations by David Hancock Turner, Penelope paints its title character as the author of The Odyssey. Its a promising twist, and it builds on an established idea that The Odyssey, a work abundant with substantial female characters Penelope, Athena, Calypso, Circe, even the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis is not a male creation.

The novelist and critic Samuel Butler, in the 1890s, theorized that a woman must have written it. The classicist Robert Graves whose Butler-inspired 1955 novel, Homers Daughter, imagines a Sicilian princess as the author of The Odyssey called it a poem about and for women, its hero notwithstanding.

Penelope, at the Theater at St. Jeans on Manhattans Upper East Side, feels like a musical about and for men. In its cast of 10, there are just three women, including Britney Nicole Simpson, who makes a lovely Off Broadway debut in the title role. It is not through any shortcoming of hers that this ostensibly female-centric show, as a program note puts it, is so enamored of its male characters: the five tiresome suitors; Penelope and Odysseuss son, Telemachus; and especially Odysseus. Penelope snaps into focus only in Act 2, when the wandering king returns and takes over a plot that had always been about his absence anyway.

If you are looking for a vividly written Penelope, you would do better with Madeline Millers 2018 novel Circe, in which Penelope is indelible, and surprising, in a small supporting role. Here, though, the story that Kellogg (book and lyrics) and Weiner (music) tell suffers from a failure of imagination, as if making her a weaver of tales rather than of cloth gives her definition enough. (In The Odyssey, she promises to wed as soon as she finishes a weaving project, then unravels her work each night.) She does have Odysseuss nurse, Eurycleia (an expert Leah Hocking), to conspire with, but wheres the rest of her orbit?

If, on the other hand, you are looking for an old-fashioned, comfort-food kind of musical with goofball humor, unpretentious songs and a heroine who is just fine with the world never knowing that she wrote one of its classics (I, for one, had trouble swallowing that concession), Penelope may be a good fit.

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Penelope Review: Adrift Between Ithaca and Progress - The New York Times