CAMELOT

Just think of “Camelot” as the geometry of medieval times, with its Round Table and love triangle.

King Arthur wants to return knights to acts of chivalry and sets up his Round Table with its motto “Might for right”; meanwhile, his wife Guenevere falls in love with Sir Lancelot, though she still loves Arthur.

“It’s an eight-person adaptation by David Lee, where he distills the story,” says Jeffrey Binder, Gulfshore Playhouse’s former associate artistic director. He’s returned to Naples to direct this musical.

When the venue staged the eight-person version of Lerner and Loewe’s “My Fair Lady,” it was “a big success, beautifully done. It showed Gulfshore Playhouse that they could do things like that and have a lot of fun with it and be dramatically compelling and the audience would really take to it.”

The musical’s book from 1960 is “pretty ponderous,” he says, “and from a different time. It’s at least a three-hour foray into that world. It’s one of those musicals that is loved by everyone, but it’s difficult to do. Everybody loves the music but the script needs some love in 2023.”

The musical returns to Broadway this spring, with a new version of the book by Aaron Sorkin and direction by Barlett Sher, the same duo of the recent production of “To Kill A Mockingbird.”

The 1960 Tony award-winning musical’s based on T.H. White’s novel, “The Once and Future King” and features beloved songs such as “If Ever I Would Leave You,” “What Do the Simple Folks Do?” “The Lusty Month of May,” “I Wonder What the King is Doing Tonight,” as well as the title song, “Camelot.”

The show, which starred Julie Andrews, Richard Burton and Robert Goulet, initially has problems with its length, as its Toronto tryout before it hit Broadway ran 4½ hours … and that had been cut down from its previous six!

Even though it was pared down, the show can still run long and feel kind of clunky.

“So what David Lee did,” Mr. Binder says, “is focus on the love story and trim a lot of the fat out of it. And it’s much more streamlined, in my mind, much more dramatically compelling in the way it tells the story without meandering. You really get to focus on this love story between these three people with the backdrop of Camelot.”

Like the venue’s 2016 production of Lerner and Loewe’s “My Fair Lady,” this production features a reduced cast — this time, only eight actors. And instead of two pianos onstage, there are three musicians playing new orchestrations by Steve Orich.

“Like that production of ‘My Fair Lady,’ you’ve got to get very creative and tell the story in a unique way,” Mr. Binder says. “That’s the sort of thing I love to do. I love that kind of challenge and I love to jump in and think of alternate ways to tell the story. Not that we’re altering it or changing it, but it becomes the musicians and the actors almost around a campfire telling this mythical tale that survived for well over a millennium. It gives us intimacy with the story but also allows it to have that mythical vibe that needs a lot of imagination from the audience, actors, and from directing. It’s been a fantastic challenge to dive into it that way.”

The book, he says, holds up better.

“It’s such a massive story,” Mr. Binder says. “It’s epic, and it’s a love story. What do you choose to put into a musical so that it’s compelling and resonates? At the time, they were being compared to ‘My Fair Lady.’ There was enormous pressure on them to (replicate that previous success). They were in the shadow of that, and it put extra pressure on them. They had a decent run at the time, but ‘Camelot’ wasn’t the runaway magnificent success ‘My Fair Lady’ was.

“But people love it. The album was No. 1 on the album charts for a long time. The music was always, always incredibly successful.”

In fact, it was one of the albums played repeatedly in his home when he was growing up.

“All these songs I’ve heard many, many times, out of context,” he says. “They haven’t lost their beauty, but one of the challenges is, how do we make them alive in the show? What is happening in this story that makes these stories something that needs to be sung? When you find that, these songs come alive in a way that I haven’t felt since the first time I heard them. We have incredible singers and good actors. I’m so grateful this cast is as talented as they are. They just move me. They just make these songs come alive.”

The way Lerner and Loewe wrote the songs is a standard musical comedy, he says, “and then the writing turns, and it turns into something very tragic. It’s fascinating to hear the songs and the style in the context of how they wrote it, and that they did that in a really profound way.”

The theme of “Camelot” is always relevant, he says and speaks to modern times.

“I think we’re always grappling with this, the idealism of striving for perfection, the idealism of humanity searching for something pure. And that purity in the play is Camelot and the Round Table, and ‘might for right,’ that the knights put aside their violence towards one another and use their knighthood and their strength to protect the innocent and meek and create a better world. It’s incredible idealism, the shining city on a hill, where everyone works for the betterment of humanity.

“But,” he says, “that ideal is contrasted by the unfortunate fact that we’re all human. We strive for things that we want to be true, but we are human: we have frailties, we have pride, we have lust, we have all those things that are constantly challenging the perfection for which we strive to achieve. The harder we reach for it, the more devastating it is when it comes crumbling down.”

And yet…

“And yet, we take the things we learned and go forward with hope again, to find that ideal again.” ¦

In the KNOW

“Camelot”

» When: Feb. 11-March 12 (previews Feb. 9, 10)

» Where: Gulfshore Playhouse at The Norris Center, 755 8th Ave. South, Naples

» Cost: $80 to $45

» Information:239-2671-PLAY or www.gulfshoreplayhouse.org