Feeling trapped in shadow? Paramount’s ‘Groundhog Day’ suggests that spring can always come again

Given the sheer amount of traps involved in building a musical out of the film Groundhog Day—and no less than Stephen Sondheim conceded it would just be “gilding the lily” anyway—it’s remarkable just how much the show that played London, Broadway, and now Aurora (in a regional premiere) gets right. Its short Broadway run might suggest otherwise. Chalk it up to film-to-musical fatigue, maybe, though that production seemed, if anything, fatiguing, somewhat out of line for what is a little Zen comedy at heart. (Among other things, a double-turntable mishap tore star Andy Karl’s A.C.L.) Or chalk it up to the increasingly wary prospect of spending an evening with a city-slick jerk, even if residual goodwill for Bill Murray’s film performance helps alleviate that slickness.

In the Chicago theatrical tradition, no one can accuse anyone at Paramount Theatre’s production of gilding or overdoing anything. Everything is proportioned as it should be. Director Jim Corti just needs the one turntable and a few wagons. Otherwise, Courtney O’Neill’s black-box igloo, augmented by Mike Tutaj’s projections, sets the scene just fine.

The scene is Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, of course, a bucolic small town that our city-slick jerk, weatherman Phil Connors (Alex Syiek), is forced to visit every year to file a quick puff piece on the shadow-spotting state of its most famous resident, the groundhog. When unexpected blizzards close the roads, he’s forced to stay an extra night. Hell for a man who’d prefer to be anywhere (anywhen) but where (when) he is presently…But then he wakes up on February 2nd again…and again…and again. And the groundhog keeps seeing his shadow anew. And everyone else keeps saying and doing the same things like nothing’s out of the ordinary. For Phil, a whole lotta panic, a whole lotta hedonism, a whole lotta despair, and, ultimately, a whole lotta kindness ensues. Because, as it turns out, kindness is the only thing that can move anyone forward, time loops notwithstanding.
In adapting his own screenplay, Danny Rubin turns in a surprisingly subtle musical book. Admittedly not the highest bar to clear, given the raft of screenwriters who’ve been blindly trusted to tweak their old film work to a new medium. It helps that the premise itself is inherently theatrical; rather David Ives-ian, really, the notion of repeating a day over and over until Phil gets it right. It also helps that his efforts to deepen the film’s supporting characters—the female lead, producer Rita Hanson (Phoebe Gonzáles), in particular—amount to more than a single throwaway sentence of backstory for each of them. In fairness, Tim Minchin’s songs do most of that lifting, but Rubin provides the tee-up.

Known primarily as a comedy songwriter (though with the award-winning Matilda to his name), Minchin’s Groundhog Day score might be controversial. Go in expecting more in the way of musical sequences as opposed to individual songs. Marvel at how Minchin (with an assist from arranger Christopher Nightingale) extracts the whole of the show’s musical structure from a few strands of DNA. Ride through some of the individual songs that, though very funny, can’t help but feel like trunk songs. (Minchin has made a career out of songs like “Stuck,” a piss-take on homeopathy and other pseudosciences that he can carve up like juicy steak.) Melt when his sardonicism gives way to an genuinely earned earnestness.
Alex Syiek may be a hair more hangdog, a inch more irascible than his film counterpart, which might make warming up to him a little tricky, but Bill Murray didn’t get the honor on singing “Seeing You,” one of the finest ballads of the last many years. For her part, Phoebe Gonzáles’s Rita is an ideal comic foil for Syiek—grounded yet optimistic in every way that Phil is not—and she pulls out a thread of development for her even if we’re watching her day on repeat, and she sings a treat, too.

So, feeling trapped in endless shadow? Groundhog Day suggests that, sooner or later (be it six weeks later, a decade later, ten thousand years later), spring will come again. Or, at the very least, there will be sun if you care to look beyond the clouds. That’s cause enough to come out of the burrow and make for Aurora.

Groundhog Day runs through March 13th at Paramount Theatre, 23 E. Galena Blvd., Aurora. For tickets or more information, please call (630) 896-6666 or visit ParamountAurora.com.

Photos by Liz Lauren.