If you are looking for an antidote to the virus of Disney musicals, this show could have been designed in a laboratory for that specific task. The theme is sadness: unrequited love, misdirected love, betrayed love, and loneliness.
The mystery of the beauty of sadness is well worth attention
It is important to know what you are getting; this is not the normal theatrical structure of three or four acts. It opens with a wordless dance theatre introduction to the themes, and develops into frozen summaries of the characters’ shades of sadness through tableaus and projected still portraits. Gradually snatches of sentences are introduced in the manner of a musical fugue as each character begins to relate the story of their heartbreak. Eventually the characters turn to songs of sadness with the actor-musicians performing pieces by Bach, Hank Marvin, Orange Juice, Etta James.
Written and directed by Nicholas Bone, with the video designs by Marisa Zanotti, the performances are solid throughout, although I’d say the performance of Etta James’ I’d Rather Go Blind is a particular highlight, and it is refreshing to see a production that mixes movement, words and music to give the potential to reflect the different emotional facets of a theme. And the theme itself – the mystery of the beauty of sadness is well worth attention.
But to be a killjoy (killsad?), for whatever reason – and I am sure they are good reasons – the tickets are not cheap for a show that barely lasts an hour. The production feels unbalanced – with much of the show building up to a musical section that seems to be over as soon as it begins. There is no sense of a climax or a conclusion, which ultimately makes the show unfulfilling. As a certain politician would say: Sad.
