The Secret Life of Bees
Book by Lynn Nottage
Music by Duncan Sheik
Lyrics by Susan Birkenhead
Based on the novel by Sue Monk Kidd
Directed by Sam Gold
Atlantic Theater Company
June 9, 2019
Production website
💉💉💉 out of 5.

The Secret Life of Bees was another experiment in taking a wildly popular novel and adapting it for the stage – but more than a play, they worked to transform this into a musical!  Here in Bees, the music was just breathtaking.  You had great music, great lyrics sung by some of the best vocalists theatre has working right now.  It was so moving to listen to.

The story around it, however, didn’t make a lot of sense.  Characters were jumping from an abusive home to a new safe home to a young relationship to an arrest to – – – and you seldom saw the threads that connected them.  I found myself often asking, “how did we get here?” – or “wasn’t this a bit more struggle to get from point A to point D? – especially when you cut out B and C.  Love stories were told with a beautiful love song, but you know so little about the people in the relationship that the story didn’t really stick with you.

It felt more like a musical attached to Spark or Cliff notes and not to a coherent story.  But really the music was so majestic that I would have been content for this evening to have been a concert with a bit of a staged reading behind it.