Off Broadway Review: ‘Fortress of Solitude’

The musical timeline of The Fortress of Solitude is mid-1960s to late 1980s. But the theme of this blood-pumping, heart-thumping show — the indestructible links that bind us to the old neighborhood — is timeless. The story, from Jonathan Lethem’s 2003 novel, views two boys from the same Brooklyn neighborhood who grow up as friends. At a critical moment in their lives, one leaves and the other one stays behind. Michael Friedman follows this friendship in a soaring score that keeps reinventing itself to reflect the turbulent social forces that change neighborhoods — and friends — beyond all recognition. Is there an audience for this extraordinary show? Yes. Is there a Broadway audience? Maybe not. Dylan Ebdus (a sensitive perf from Adam Chanler-Berat), an awkward white kid living in a black neighborhood of Brooklyn in the mid-1970s, feels exactly like the outsider he is. “I’m trying to find the beat,” he sings, “But the time keeps changing on me.” Dylan is 12 years old when he meets Mingus Rude (the magnetic Kyle Beltran), a black kid from the next block who is already making his name as a tagger. A friendship is forged (in the musically rapturous “Superman”) when these imaginative boys discover that they share a yearning to be superheroes with the magic power to fly up, up and away — right out of this tough neighborhood and into the quiet Fortress of Solitude where Superman goes to escape from the world.