But for a musical that charts radical transformations in the lives of its characters, "Vanities" feels oddly static, stuck in plot grooves worn flat from familiarity.
It takes a while to attune your ear to Gurganus's pared-down prose, and until you do it can seem oddly unlubricated, sticking then surging by turns, with its quirky lack of definite articles.
Her lips were dry, and oddly, when she stuck out her tongue, it trembled as if the effort were too much for her.
It is a multi-tiered pastiche of clashing parts, a little Bosch, a little Michelangelo, a little Venetian color thrown in for good measure, the kneeling figure of Philip in black, almost like a cutout, stuck oddly into the foreground.
Oddly, though, what stuck with me was the scene in which Brown groggily dumped cat litter instead of detergent into his washing machine, exhausted not from nights peering through high-powered telescopes at Palomar Mountain or Mauna Kea but from waking up to feed his newborn daughter.
And so the game became oddly inverted, defenders sticking so tightly to forwards that most of the best chances fell to defenders making forward surges.
Della knew there was nothing important in the river, a clump of twigs and leaves, or an oddly shaped stick.
From all of this van Ruisdael forged a brooding, exotically romantic art, while van Ruysdael stuck to a wistful, oddly youthful delicacy.
But of all the things I learned from Helen during the eight years of the Reagan Administration, oddly enough, the one lesson that has stuck with me the most has nothing to do with the Presidency or journalism.
