Carly Simon's Romulus Hunt: A Family Opera

by William RuhlmannFitting into that category also occupied by Paul McCartney's Liverpool Oratorio, Carly Simon's Romulus Hunt: A Family Opera is a 46-minute musical about a 12-year-old upper-class boy living in New York City who tries to effect a reconciliation between his divorced parents. The music is pop-classical, and the singing is done by a cast of five. Simon certainly knows the material, and it gives her a chance to stretch musically, but it might better have been rendered as an after-school TV-movie than as an operetta. (Simon herself appears only at the end, singing one of the songs as a bonus track.)