For One Night Only, David Reigns

Sir Tim Rice and Alan Menken were visibly moved during a staging of their scarcely known musical King David at New York University's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts last evening. The colorful oratorio, which follows the rise and demise of the Biblical shepherd boy who slayed Goliath, was originally written to be performed in Israel to commemorate the 3,000th birthday of Jerusalem. Although tight timing and snags in the Holy Land led to the scrapping of those plans, the play was picked up by Disney, and in 1997 staged for nine nights as the launch production for the then newly renovated New Amsterdam Theatre. Rice and Menken, icons of the musical theater world, watched gleefully as the students of NYU's Steinhardt School gave performances of a lifetime, with standout turns by Jay Armstrong Johnson as King David, Katharine Heaton as Michal and Shane Quinn as King Saul. As for whether David will yet ascend the throne for an extended stay on Broadway, the answer—to borrow a line from one of the play's catchiest tunes—would seem to be that Rice and Menken are "taking it as it comes."