The geeks shall inherit…

Geeks, dorks, the invention of email, and a 2005 rock album. That’s the unlikely combination of ingredients that form the basis of Loserville, the new rock musical currently playing at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds. On paper, it looks like it could be deadly. It isn’t. Actually, it’s always entertaining and sometimes wonderful. This is the rock musical equivalent of a labrador puppy – wide-eyed, full of energy, and out to have fun.

It’s based on a rock album, but it’s not really a jukebox musical (thank God). Songwriter James Bourne and his collaborator Elliot Davis started with a 2005 album called Welcome to Loserville by Bourne’s post-Busted band Son of Dork, but they haven’t simply constructed a show around the album’s ten tracks. Instead, they’ve jettisoned half the album, taken five songs that strongly suggested characters or dramatic situations, and used those songs as the starting-point for an original musical (the five songs from the album that are used in the show are considerably transformed from their original recordings).

The result is yet another rock musical set in an American high school. Yes, from Grease to Glee to High School Musical, we’ve been here before; the twist, here, is that Loserville is told mostly from the point of view of computer geeks and sci-fi nerds. It’s 1971, and Michael Dork, a teenage computer hacker/programmer (think Steve Jobs or Bill Gates) is on the brink of inventing email, but wealthy jock Eddie, the son of the CEO of a computer company, is out to steal his idea. Can Michael win the race to send the first-ever email, and win the heart of Holly, a fellow computer geek who wants to be the first female astronaut? It’s not giving anything at all away to say that yes, he can, because you’re more or less always two steps ahead of the plot. That, though, is almost beside the point.

The thing is, this very slim story is delivered with such energy and charm that any failings in the writing – and there are some – are ultimately curiously irrelevant. Bourne’s songs (which are co-written with Davis and a number of other collaborators) sound nothing at all like the pop music of 1971, but they’re fresh, sharp and tuneful (you will come out of the theatre humming ‘Ticket Outta Loserville’), and they manage the very difficult trick of transforming authentic contemporary rock music into something genuinely theatrical. Davis’s book is fast-paced, funny, commendably economical (each act runs about fifty minutes), and sprinkled with sci-fi/pop culture allusions (many Star Trek references, an extended and suitably over-the-top scene set at a fan convention, and one character – named Lucas – is writing a book that will clearly become a very well-known film franchise. Hint: it’s set in space, and he’s beginning his story with chapter four). The characters in Loserville are all stereotypes, true, but when they’re drawn this colourfully, who cares? The show never takes itself too seriously (although it stops short of being an out-and-out spoof), and in Steven Dexter’s production it’s so exuberant that you can’t help being carried along for the ride. The cast (of 20) and the tight, appropriately loud five-piece band deliver pitch-perfect performances, to the point where it’s unfair to single any individual out for special praise. These actors – all of them – have singing voices with character – there’s no glossy, robotic Lea Michele-style belting here, and thanks to Simon Baker’s impeccably clear sound design you can hear all the lyrics, which is depressingly unusual at rock musicals these days. Nick Winston’s hilariously dorky choreography is so energetic that I think I lost five pounds just watching it, and the show is presented on a marvellously inventive set by Francis O’Connor that mixes early-70s futuristic backdrops (flashing LEDs, printed circuits, spinning data tapes) with outsize educational supplies (notebooks and pencils used to suggest everything from doors and windows to bowling pins) to tremendous comic effect. In a planetarium scene in the first act (lighting by Howard Harrison), it’s even beautiful.

It’s not quite perfect. The character arc for Holly could use a little sharpening, and there’s the occasional maladroit lyric or one-liner that doesn’t quite land. What’s required, though, is judicious tweaking rather than a major rewrite: the show is almost there, and it’s never less than thoroughly entertaining. It certainly deserves a wider audience and a life beyond Leeds.

And, dammit, I want a cast album!

Overheard

Yesterday afternoon, I saw Opera North’s magnificent production of Carousel at the Grand Theatre in Leeds. I love the Grand Theatre – it’s one of the most charming of Britain’s major touring theatres, and the auditorium is truly lovely – and I love the show. I’ve written a separate post praising the production to the skies; it should have been a glorious experience. It wasn’t, quite.

The problem, yet again, was disruptive behaviour from somewhere in the auditorium – in this case, exacerbated by the fact that this production is all but unamplified, which means there’s a far greater potential for what I suppose we must call noise pollution. Most of the audience, once they’d clicked into concentrating on a production that is significantly less loud than your average overamplified big musical, sat and listened very intently. A couple of mobile phones rang – there was no pre-show announcement about switching them off, and there should have been – and there was the occasional sound of crinkling candy wrappers. The biggest source of disruption, though, came from a rather more delicate source.

Somewhere in the part of the theatre where I was sitting (the dress circle, I was in the back row), several seats over to my right and not visible from where I was sitting, there was what sounded like an adult woman with some kind of severe mental disability. I never saw this person, so that’s an assumption. What I do know is that most of the show was accompanied by a stream of noise from this person – low (but not quiet) moaning, brief louder wailing, snatches of singing, and a sound that resembled a cross between throat-clearing and blowing a raspberry. I have no idea where this person was sitting, other than in one of seven rows of seats somewhere to my right; I assume she was not unaccompanied. Particularly in a very nearly unamplified production, this was significantly disruptive, and I was not the only person who remarked on it at the interval. I don’t know if anybody said anything to the front of house staff at the interval; I didn’t, partly because, God knows, I can’t help but feel for both this person and whoever was with her, and partly because I couldn’t narrow down the source of the sound any closer than a block of about 150 seats. The disruption in the first half, though, was severe enough that a competent house management should have noticed it and dealt with it off their own bat; evidently they did not, because these sounds continued all through the second half as well.

As much as I feel for this person, and for the people with her, there’s a huge disrespect for the rest of the paying audience in evidence – not on the part of the woman with the disability (the sounds definitely did not come from a child), but from whoever was with her. If you took a child to that kind of event, and they made the kind of noise that would disrupt the experience for other members of the audience, you’d take them out. If you heard a child making that kind of disruptive noise, it would be easier to talk to front of house about it.

At the back of my head, there was the terrifying notion that to make a complaint about this person would somehow be to suggest that people with disabilities should be locked away, and of course that’s not what I think at all. But I do think that anybody attending a live performance (and in this case, I specifically mean the carer/parent/whatever who accompanied this woman to the theatre) should have enough respect for the rest of the audience that they take quick, decisive steps to minimise any behaviour that might disrupt the show for other patrons, and that a competent front-of-house management should pay attention to what is going on in an auditorium during a performance and, if necessary, take action before being prompted by another ticket-holder. Yesterday afternoon’s experience fell considerably short of that. Since these noises continued unimpeded through more or less the entire performance, it’s impossible not to conclude that whoever was accompanying this individual didn’t have any respect or consideration for the rest of the audience. Given that the front-of-house staff did not appear to notice the problem, much less intervene, I’m afraid it’s also difficult not to conclude that their attitude towards their paying customers is not quite what it should be. Now, true, I didn’t complain – but the level of noise was such that I shouldn’t have had to.

Don’t get me wrong – I loved the production. And, probably, in this instance, I should have been less squeamish about coming forward and notifying front-of-house that there was a problem (me and a few hundred other people), and it’s certainly not as if either noisy audience behaviour or inept front-of-house management are at all unusual in British theatres. But going to the theatre and experiencing a show without encountering any kind of bad behaviour from other audience members is becoming the exception rather than the rule, and that’s not good enough, and I’m afraid the front-of-house management have to shoulder some of the responsibility. Theatre tickets are expensive to the degree that it is simply not acceptable for a front-of-house management to adopt a laissez-faire attitude towards disruptive behaviour, whatever the source. I’ve done the job myself, and this is not a pleasant aspect of it, but part of the house management’s job is to ensure that everyone in the auditorium experiences the performance without any disruption from other members of the audience, whether or not anyone makes a complaint. Yesterday afternoon, the front-of-house management in the Grand Theatre in Leeds did not do their job, and their customers deserved better.

Welcome to 1945.

First clue that this is not your standard-issue big musical revival, circa 2012: there’s no sound designer credited in the programme (although there is a sound engineer listed way down in the technical credits at the back). The second clue: the first few rows of seats in the Leeds Grand Theatre’s stalls are missing, swallowed up by the orchestra pit. Yes, there was a similarly-enlarged pit a few weeks ago at Wonderful Town at The Lowry as well, but trust me, it’s unusual.

This time, though, we’re here for Rodgers and Hammerstein, rather than Bernstein: Carousel, as revived by Leeds-based Opera North, which means we get their full orchestra of fifty or so players, a large chorus, and a separate troupe of dancers, and the conductor (Jonathan Gill at yesterday afternoon’s performance) takes a curtain call with the cast. Carousel is probably my favourite of all of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s scores, and the opportunity to hear it with this size orchestra and chorus doesn’t come around very often. Here, the very first article in the (rather expensive) programme – before anything at all about either Rodgers and Hammerstein or the show itself – is a two-page piece about Don Walker’s original orchestrations, which were painstakingly recreated by a team from the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization in 2000 (the full set of charts had been missing for decades; the National Theatre revival in 1992 used a new set of orchestrations, based on the originals, by William David Brohn). Clearly, this is not a case of an opera company slumming it at the lighter end of the repertoire. It’s not an absolutely complete presentation of the score because “The Highest Judge of All” is cut (and not particularly missed; it was cut from the National Theatre production as well, and I honestly think that section of the show plays better without it), but it’s obvious that everyone involved here has the utmost respect for this material.

And, it has to be said, this production offers an absolutely glorious account of the music. The orchestra’s playing is impeccable throughout – not stiff and reverential, but gutsy and full of life – and they’re matched by the singers, right down to the last member of the chorus. Carousel is not a pretty show – at core, while it ends with the promise of redemption, it’s a dark, unhappy love story between two people who are each in their way very damaged – and for a full production to work, the material demands a great deal more than an impeccable orchestra and marvellous singers (no, I’m not going to summarise the plot – we’ve all seen it, and if you haven’t, Wikipedia offers a fuller synopsis than I would). There’s a difficult line to tread here – in the National Theatre production, Michael Hayden and Joanna Riding offered devastating acting performances as Billy Bigelow and Julie Jordan, but the music sat very uncomfortably on their voices, and they both strained for the higher notes. Here, we have West End actor Keith Higham as Billy (at matinees only; at evening performances the role is played by American opera singer Eric Greene) playing opposite British soprano Gillene Herbert as Julie. Neither has any difficulty at all with the music – Herbert’s “What’s the Use of Wondrin’?” is as good a performance of the song as I’ve ever heard – and they create an utterly convincing portrait of this very, very troubled couple. Their bench scene – the lengthy sequence that includes “If I Loved You” – is simply flawless.

[I could, here, offer a very lengthy aside in which I traced the beginning of the concept of the 'integrated musical' to the bench scene in Carousel, rather than to Oklahoma!, Rodgers and Hammerstein's first collaboration, to which far too many historians attribute far too much influence - but anybody reading this who knows me and has any kind of interest in musicals has probably heard it before, so I won't... except to say, baldly, that I think the bench scene in Carousel was a more influential moment in the development American musical than the premiere of Oklahoma!. This is a blog post, not an academic paper, and a 5,000-word essay on the subject would be a little over the top.]

The other leads? There’s absolutely delightful work from Clara Boulter and Joseph Shovelton and Carrie Pipperidge and Enoch Snow, a beautifully-danced Louise from Beverley Grant, and a fine, rough Jigger Craigin from Michael Rouse. Towering above them all, there’s Elena Ferrari’s Nettie Fowler. Last year, I saw Ms. Ferrari give a breathtaking performance as the tragic Anna Maurrant in a chamber production of Street Scene. Yesterday, I saw her take “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and sing it simply and directly, as if nobody had ever touched it before, with no hint of grandstanding but with enormous emotional force. Her “June is Bustin’ Out All Over” was warm, funny, and absolutely charming; her “You’ll Never Walk Alone” was probably definitive. And yes, I cried, even though I know that moment in the play is shamelessly manipulative.

The production is lovely to look at, too. Director Jo Davies has shifted the plot forward in time a little, so that this production begins in 1915; that’s still almost a century ago, but it means the clothes and props are a little closer to items that would be worn/used today, and in a production in which the music is privileged above everything else, it’s a choice that takes away a little of the potential for starchiness. Anthony Ward’s set – fairground lights, a bleached treetrunk, ocean vistas, clapboard walls, wooden piers and houses – is deceptively simple and superbly evocative, as are Bruno Poet’s lighting and Andrzej Goulding’s (very lightly-used) video design, and between them, at the beginning of the Act Two  ballet, they manage a startling coup-de-théâtre to show Billy’s descent from Heaven back to Earth (if you haven’t seen this production and are going to in the future, I suppose this is a spoiler, so highlight the following couple of lines to read a description. Louise is first seen at the beach, in scratchy silent film projected on a clapboard wall at the back of the set. The square projected image slowly widens to become a panorama of the beach scene, and then the clapboard wall rises to reveal Louise in exactly the same spot she’d been in in the film, on the beach, in front of projected rolling waves). There’s strong, muscular choreography from Kay Shepherd, and it’s to her very, very great credit that in the crowd scenes it’s difficult to see the join between the singing chorus and the dancers. Occasionally, the pacing could be a little tighter, and the staging of the robbery scene (which, to be fair, is not the show’s best-written moment to begin with) needs revisiting before the production moves on to its runs in London and Paris, but this is, overall, an exceptionally strong staging.

Davies and her company also deserve a lot of credit for not ducking or in any way softening the domestic violence at the heart of the plot. We are no longer living in 1945; today, the scene in which Louise asks Julie if it’s possible for someone to hit you and it not hurt at all reads very, very uncomfortably, and our society’s attitude towards violence towards women has moved on to the degree that it’s impossible not to view that moment through a contemporary filter. We see Billy commit a sin that today is more or less unpardonable – more than once – and then, at the end of the show, we see him get a second chance. In the National Theatre production, when Louise asked that question, Michael Hayden’s Billy mouthed ‘no’. That doesn’t happen here, and there’s no acting around the lines; we simply see in Billy’s face that the question makes him realise what he’s done. The scene is sensitively played, and it’s powerful, but when Julie tells her daughter that yes, it is possible for someone to hit you and it not hurt, it isn’t easy to watch, and nor should it be.

What’s really interesting about this production, though, is watching the audience adjust to receiving a production that is all but unamplified (there is amplification, but it’s so subtle that it’s almost imperceptible). At the beginning of each act, there were three or four minutes in which isolated conversations, I’m afraid, could be clearly heard from various points around the area where I was sitting – and then, by and large, people shut up and listened.

It would be nice to say that there was no bad audience behaviour on display during the performance, but that’s a longer story. Still, this is a spectacular production, and I am, as the song says, mighty glad I came, even given… well, as I said, that’s a longer story.

Celibate nuns out there shaking their buns…

They’re ba-aack! And this week they’re in Leeds. Sister Act: The Musical has hit the road in Britain, billed as being ‘direct from the London Palladium‘. ‘Direct’, in this case, involves a 7,000-mile round trip across the Atlantic and back, since the version of the show that’s now touring Britain is essentially the heavily-revised incarnation of the show that opened on Broadway last year, rather than the ham-fisted, thuddingly obvious, (very) intermittently entertaining show that graced the West End in 2009 (tellingly, the programme lists the show’s first performance as the Broadway opening, not the London one). It’s been heavily revised, so it has to be better this time around, right? Well… sorta kinda. The worst bits suck less (that’s a technical term), the good bits still work, the whole thing is slicker and faster, and the Mother Superior no longer has a cringe-worthy line in which she refers to the bulges in the gangsters’ trouser pockets. All of these things, particularly the last, are cause for celebration… but don’t infer from any of the above that the revised show is good. It’s better than it was, but it’s not there yet.

And, really, it’s had enough time by now for the various people involved to work out the kinks in the book and the score. Based, of course, on the 1992 movie (I’m not going to outline the plot because everyone who might be remotely interested in a review of the stage musical has seen the film already), the stage musical version was first staged in Pasadena in 2006, and that production then moved to Atlanta in 2007. After undergoing some revisions, it opened in London in 2009 to decidedly mixed reviews, and then it underwent a lot more revision (including what amounts to an entire new book) before it arrived on Broadway in 2011. In all incarnations, the show somewhat rethinks its source material: it’s now set in Philadelphia, rather than Reno, in 1977 rather than the present day, and Alan Menken‘s music is best when it pastiches the soul/gospel/disco styles of that era. The musical also takes the brave decision to throw out all of the nuns’ performance numbers from the film and replace them with new music written specifically for the show, and those new numbers, although they’re gaudy and splashy and slightly too on-the-nose (not to mention way overchoreographed and over-designed), work well and are great fun, and that’s an achievement given how successful the movie’s musical numbers were. That’s good news, but it’s also where the good news ends, more or less.

The show’s biggest problem is the book, although ‘book’, in this incarnation, is overstating things – it’s more of a plot delivery device punctuated by weak one-liners. The source film, God knows, isn’t perfect, but it does at least manage to present a set of warm, believable, funny characters, and it’s to the film’s very great credit that it never once, even for a second, presents the nuns as buffoons, even though some of them are certainly eccentric. Because, in the musical, everybody seems to get a song, the book has been filleted down so that most scenes, now, seem to consist of two or three lines of exposition followed by a song cue. Given the clunking horror of a book – credited to Cheri Steinkellner & Bill Steinkellner, whose list of theatrical credits is not extensive – that was in place when the show opened in London, this is an improvement; the ‘additional book material’ by Douglas Carter Beane (a nice way of saying ‘whole new book by’) is a lot less than completely successful, but at least it contains no lines that are so bad they make you stuff your fist in your mouth and squirm in your seat.

Unfortunately, because there’s so little of it, it also contains no actual characters, only stick figures with a single defining characteristic each. Deloris might as well walk onstage at the top of the show and announce, “Hi, everybody! I’m black and sassy!” – that’s all the actress is given to play until the last ten minutes of the second act. The roles of the gangsters and Eddie the cop have been beefed up at the expense of Sister Mary Patrick (the Kathy Najimy role) and Sister Mary Robert, significant supporting roles in the film that are almost relegated to bit-parts here, even though Mary Robert gets her own song in Act Two. Key plot points don’t happen, they’re announced, which means that the final scene between Deloris and the Mother Superior, which was quietly, sweetly touching in the film, registers precisely no emotional impact here, although the hard-working actors do what they can with the material. The show plays like a first draft, rather than the latest in a series of rewrites that stretches across at least five years.

The show does at least come to life a little when people start to sing, and the book scenes are so brief that a song is almost never more than a couple of minutes away. Deloris’s top-of-Act-One ‘Fabulous, Baby!’ and the nuns’ performance numbers – ‘Take Me to Heaven’, ‘Sunday Morning Fever’, and ‘Spread the Love Around’ – are the best things in the show; during those songs – and only during those songs – we get a glimpse of the vibrant, exciting musical comedy that this could have been but isn’t. The songs for the gangsters and Eddie the cop are fun but strangely irrelevant – they’re entertaining enough, but they don’t tell us anything we don’t already know, and they stop the show cold in precisely the wrong way. The rest of the score is not exactly top-tier Menken; the title song is pleasant but generic and utterly forgettable, and the Mother Superior’s two songs are almost magnificently dull. Worst of all is Sister Mary Robert’s ‘The Life I Never Led’, a climb-every-molehill howler that, astonishingly, gets a reprise; it ends on a big-ass money note, and before that it consists almost entirely of hot air. The just-about-adequate lyrics are by Glenn Slater, whose worst excesses – contained in a truly witless number for the nuns called ‘How I Got the Calling’ – have, thank God, been removed from this version of the show. The replacement number – ‘It’s Good to be a Nun’ – might not be exactly good, but at least we no longer get to hear Sister Mary Patrick relate the story of how she saw the face of Jesus in a coconut cream pie (I wish I was making that up). All of the musical numbers – good or bad, fast or slow, strident or introspective – are delivered at ear-splitting, headache-inducing, brain-numbing volume, presumably because it’s easier to grab the audience’s attention by turning up the sound system than by writing material that’s actually engaging.

What we do have here, at least, is a mostly very strong cast. Cynthia Erivo is a real find as Deloris – great voice, moves well, charisma to burn, and she’s a RADA-trained actress who manages to supply at least a little of the subtlety that is almost entirely missing from the book and the score. If she can’t quite sell the title song, she does as much with it as anybody could (and certainly is at least as good as Patina Miller, who originated the role in London and on Broadway), and when she rips into ‘Fabulous, Baby!’, she’s absolutely thrilling. Denise Black throws everything she’s got at the role of the Mother Superior, and she’s miraculously funny given the limitations of the script; she’s defeated by her two bad songs, but anyone would be. The cops and gangsters are fine, and Michael Starke is great fun as the Monsignor; given the score, it’s possibly to his advantage that he isn’t lumbered with a song, and he gets (and lands) a fair number of the best lines. Laurie Scarth’s Sister Mary Patrick is badly short-changed by the book and score; she does what she can, but in this incarnation of the show it’s not a role in which anyone is going to make much of an impression. Julie Atherton’s Sister Mary Robert, however, is something else entirely – honest, charming, sweetly funny, and she’s got the closest thing anyone in the show has to an actual character arc. She even – twice – more or less manages to sell the dire ‘The Life I Never Led’. She’s great, and it’s a great shame that her material isn’t nearly as good as she is. The choir of nuns are wonderful when they’re singing, and less wonderful when they’re not, largely because the dialogue they’re given is so perfunctory.

All of which makes the show sound completely awful. It isn’t. Jerry Zaks’ direction is slick and fast-moving, and the show’s pace is such that you never have to dwell too long on material that doesn’t work (it’s certainly an improvement over the work of Peter Schneider, who directed the London production – his greatest achievement was making sure the actors didn’t bump into either each other or the set). Anthony Van Laast’s choreography is energetic, obvious, and best when it parodies period disco moves; watching a choir of nuns shake their booties is fun the first time but subject to the law of diminishing returns unless you take the idea and develop it, and adding gaudy costumes with lots of sequins does not count as developing a choreographic idea, although the writing for the choir numbers is strong enough that those sequences would probably land if the nuns just stood there doing the hand jive. The show is often almost completely soulless, and yet the few really good sequences are legitimately exciting and great fun; they, and the cast, make it worth sitting through the mass of material that doesn’t work as well as it should. Klara Zieglerova’s set and Lez Brotherston’s costumes provide an occasionally witty excursion through 70s kitsch; Natasha Katz’s lighting is unrestrained by base considerations like good taste and subtlety. This show is loud, both to listen to and to look at, and Gareth Owen, the sound designer, should be locked away and made to do some kind of penance until he promises never to do it again. His work here isn’t a sound design, it’s an aural mugging stretched over two hours of stage time.

The great shame of it is that the show should have been so much better than it is. A stage musical based on Sister Act is not an inherently terrible idea, and everyone involved has done better work elsewhere. The cast work hard, and this iteration of the show has, in Ms. Erivo and Ms. Black, two really terrific leading ladies. In the few moments where the show really comes to life, it’s wonderful; unfortunately, those moments are few and far between. What’s truly dispiriting is that the show, even after having been developed through so many previous incarnations, still doesn’t completely work, given that the necessary fixes aren’t all that difficult to spot. Sister Act, unfortunately, is mostly a disappointment, even now – the only consolation is that it’s a disappointment with three or four really good things in it. At these prices, I’m afraid, that’s not enough.

Oh yes – and finally, let’s all give a big shout-out to the lady on the far end of row C in the stalls, house-left, who took flash photographs all the way through the second act. Madam, you’re a credit to your species. Whatever that might be.

Butterfly…

I saw a new musical yesterday. Yes, that’s an event, new musicals don’t come around very often these days, particularly outside of London.  The Go-Between, at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds. It’s based, of course, on the novel by L.P. Hartley and, like the novel, it opens with that line. And then it goes to some places you really don’t expect.

Not particularly in terms of content, actually. As far as I can remember (it’s a decade and a half at least since I read the novel), the musical makes no major changes to the source material’s plot. What’s interesting, here, is the way David Wood (book and lyrics) and Richard Taylor (music and lyrics) handle the transition from speech to singing. I’ve never seen a musical use music quite the way this one does.

The plot is familiar from the novel and the (excellent) film – a middle-class schoolboy, Leo, who is spending the summer as the guest of an upper-class schoolfriend and his family at their country estate becomes the means via which his friend’s older sister Marian sends messages to the tenant farmer who is her secret lover. When the affair is finally exposed, there are dreadful consequences for both Leo and Marian – and the musical artfully uses the difference between what is spoken and what is sung to show the gradual erosion of Leo’s naiveté. After a brief prologue, we see Leo arriving at Brandham hall; he has never seen upper-class life from the inside before, and he finds both the estate and Marian utterly enchanting. Accordingly, from this point on, everything is sung, with the music functioning rather in the same way as heightened prose in a magic-realist novel. Leo thinks he’s in an enchanted world, and the music lends enchantment. Once the singing starts, we are not in a traditional musical, either – the closest equivalent would be something like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. There are almost no songs in the traditional sense. Instead, there are sung scenes that run together creating the effect of a continuous piece of music. But when the scales start to fall from Leo’s eyes, and harsh reality begins to intrude on this enchanted world, the music stops, and in fact the most important, most emotionally painful scenes, in terms of the plot, are spoken rather than sung. In most musicals, the music starts when the emotions get bigger. Here, when the emotions become overwhelming, the music stops. It’s startling, and it works.

It’s not a perfect show. The prologue (in which the older Leo sorts through a trunk of childhood artifacts in his attic as figures from his past encourage him in song to be brave and face his demons), frankly, clunks. The recitative in the sung scenes can get a little relentless, particularly in the first half – partly because the first act is rather slack, stretching about thirty minutes of plot out over an hour and ten minutes. For long stretches, nothing much happens, and people keep singing about it. The music is always interesting, but the show could easily lose half an hour. The second act is much tighter.

There is, though, still a great deal to admire. The production – directed by Roger Haines on a simple but evocative unit set by Michael Pavelka (a bleached wood floor with tufts of grass here and there, skewed walls, doorways with no doors, and an endless summer sky), with exemplary music direction (and piano playing) by Jonathan Gill – is faultless, the performances are superb. The child who played Leo at the performance I saw – Jake Abbott – was astonishingly good, and Sophie Bould’s Marian is perfectly acted and gorgeously sung, but there are no weak links among the cast. The music – accompanied only by a single piano, but conceived that way by the composer (who carefully informs us in a programme interview that he actually turned down additional musicians because he wanted a solo piano only) – is always expertly performed, even if it doesn’t, in the first act, always entirely hold your attention. It rarely coalesces into anything most of us would recognise as a song, but when it finally does, midway through Act One, the song is extraordinary. That would be a song called “Butterfly”, sung by the older Leo as he compares his early days at Brandham to a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis; it’s very, very lovely, and you can hear it here, sung (beautifully) by an actor named Nigel Richards. He’s not in the production, and this recording – made for Mr. Richards’ solo album – uses an orchestration rather than the solo piano accompaniment heard in the theatre, but the chance of a cast recording of the show being made is almost nil, so this will have to do.

The show, after closing in Leeds, goes on to play runs at the Derby Theatre and the Derngate in Northampton (it’s a coproduction between those two venues and the WYP). After that… who knows? It deserves a life, although it’s not perfect. It’s daring, unusual, idiosyncratic, intermittently extraordinary, and beautifully staged and performed. It’s depressing as hell that it takes no less than three regional theatres to finance a production of a new musical that has a single set, a cast of eleven, and one musician, but that’s the state of theatre in this country these days. We’re lucky it got produced at all.