In Troubled Water

Those who protested at the first preview, fearing the glorification of a murderer, need not have bothered. Salvador Agron, the teenage killer whose life story is told in the new musical “The Capeman,” has not been glamorized or celebrated. In fact, he has been only barely evoked.

After much delay, bad press and expectations, pop star Paul Simon’s musical “The Capeman” opened Thursday night at Broadway’s Marquis Theatre. While Simon’s gifts for melody and harmony float above the story like a beautiful angel, no one involved with this $11-million project has managed to connect the music with the tangible, sinuous world below--a stage on which a story needs to be told concretely, and enthusiastically if it is to be involving at all.

The musical’s far-reaching problems pervade the book, the acting, the staging and even the beguiling songs, which feature lyrics that tend toward the reflective and the internal. Simon’s rhythms in fact rule the stage; often actors are left hanging for measures at a time while they wait for their next lyric. For much of the evening, the cast looks as if it is paying penance for Agron’s sins.

This is a story that shocked New York in its day. Agron was a poor 15-year-old Puerto Rican immigrant whose cape gave him his nickname. In 1959, he and his buddy Tony Hernandez (Renoly Santiago), known as the Umbrella Man, were arrested on charges of killing two kids on a cold cement playground in Hell’s Kitchen. Although the murders occurred in the midst of gang tension, they seemed frighteningly random. The victims were strangers to the killers and not gang members. On his arrest, Agron’s cold answers to reporters’ questions seemed proof both of some kind of sociopathic monstrosity and the enduring implacability of racial animosity.

Simon is the catalyst and, by all accounts, the controlling force behind this musical, which has passed through four directors’ hands, including the credited director and choreographer, Mark Morris. “The Capeman” is most focused on the least dramatic part of Agron’s story--his prison conversion, where he taught himself to read, write poetry and find some kind of sad salvation. The star, Ruben Blades, who plays the older Agron, gives a remarkably sullen and uncomfortable performance until the curtain call, when, at Tuesday night’s press preview, he danced a few potent salsa steps that looked like a celebration of the show being over.

In the show’s more dramatic first half, which tells the story of Sal’s childhood up until his arrest, the Capeman is embodied by singer Marc Anthony. The big-eyed, wiry, bonily handsome actor bears a resemblance to the actual Agron, whose images we see in videos and projections throughout the show. Anthony croons impressively on Simon’s finest doo-wop numbers, including “Satin Summer Nights” and “Bernadette,” songs rich in nostalgia for the late ‘50s and for the moment just before Sal ruins his life.

Set designer Bob Crowley, who throughout the evening provides heady, unexpected points of view, here shows us New York as if we were lying sideways on the ground and gazing up through the tenement buildings, crowned by an L-shaped sky. He unveils the scene slowly, one lit window at a time, to magnificent effect. But, if the eye and the ear are blissfully engaged in these doo-wop numbers, the gods of storytelling go hungry.

“The Capeman” lavishes time on the employment problems of Sal’s mother Esmeralda (Ednita Nazario) in Puerto Rico and her visit to a fortuneteller, who sees the child Sal’s future in shells, and yet the show rushes through crucial plot points we need to know about.

One of these, for instance, is Sal’s conversion to the Vampires, a gang whose protection would give him the power and anonymity to stab two young men he didn’t know from behind his swirly black cape. In the awkward book by Derek Walcott, Sal is at first wary of the gang members, who circle around him in a hauntingly ominous buddy number, “The Vampires.” But a convenient visit from Sal’s nasty minister stepfather changes all that in a blink. The stepfather (Philip Hernandez) enters, demands Sal come home and smacks Sal in the face. Sal pulls a knife, and--voila--the gang is his family.

Most of the second act is tedious, thanks to lame plot devices used to enliven Sal’s prison stay. Sal emerges with a bible right away, so his actual conversion is not dramatized. Instead, we get a hostile prison guard who seems to think his income and his family’s safety are dependent on giving Sal a hard time. Also there’s Sal’s pen pal, an American Indian hippy-chick, whose lyrics, about feeling Sal’s manhood and about how the white man broke her Nation, are the worst in the show (Simon and Walcott share lyric credit throughout). Sal tries to escape to her--it’s unclear how or exactly when this takes place--but he is interrupted in the desert by a Monty Python-esque vision of Saint Lazarus, a tall, white-haired gent who looks like he was attacked by dogs after escaping from an amateur production of “1776.”

Sal returns to prison, and the final chapter of “The Capeman” finds him being released from prison in 1979. It is touching to see him emerge tentatively to find a world in which Puerto Rican-pride parades are everyday events and salsa dancing is folded into the disco scene. The sense of a wasted life is palpable at this moment.

How much of Morris’ original work as director or choreographer remains onstage now is a mystery. The dances are arresting in spurts but, like almost everything else on stage, they seem constipated. Some of Simon’s best songs--including one in which the mothers of the slain boys futilely contemplate forgiveness--are static and under-realized. If “The Capeman” was a story fully imagined in Simon’s mind, its characters remain theoretical onstage. Despite individual moments of beauty, despite much money and labor, “The Capeman” ends with a feeling of waste, not the sweep of redemption.

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* ‘The Capeman,” Marquis Theatre, Broadway and 46th Street, New York, (800) 755-4000.