Review tick, tick ... BOOM!

tick, tick ... BOOM!
Book, Music And Lyrics by Jonathan Larson

The Next Big (Fat-Free But Tasty) Musical
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

What, reviewing the late Jonathan Larson's early musical when one hasn't even seen Rent, his celebrated riff on La Bohème? TLT and the engine beneath her wings feel they should come clean but, on the other hand, they come to Tick, Tick ... Boom! with a clean slate and ready to be entertained.

Tick, Tick ... Boom! appears to be an apprentice musical in more ways than one. Larson, who was also an actor, performed it as a solo rock show from 1990.  It slides, deliberately we think, from beginner's promise but structural clunkiness into something more sophisticated as the song styles and book grow in complexity.

It's highly autobiographical - the central character is a struggling aspiring songwriter called Jon who, like Larson, waits on tables while he awaits his big break. He is turning from 29 to the big 3-Oh (that's oh-oh!). His dance teacher girlfriend Susan aches to break away from tutoring weathy little 'uns for her own big break. But she also longs for the stability of marriage and suburban life.

That's not to be confused with Jon's (and Larson's) first attempt at a musical, the unfinished scifi Superbia, one song of which, Come To Your Senses, David Auburn, who revised Tick, Tick ... Boom!, incorporated into the later show.

Auburn turned Tick, Tick... Boom!, after Larson's premature death, from a solo musical monologue to a revamped chamber musical three-hander, its present form.

Jon (Chris Jenkins from The Burnt Part Boys) spends his time working in a diner, smoking joints on the rooftop of his Soho apartment in between working on his musical.

However spiritually he agonizes as his birthday approaches and his dreams of a produced musical remain unfulfilled.

He is still close to Michael (Jordan Shaw) with whom he grew up and went to summer camp. Michael though has long abandoned his own dream to become an actor to chase the mighty dollar in a Madison Avenue advertising firm, gain a coveted swish car (hey, what's wrong with that?, demands TLT's automotive sidekick indignantly!) and a luxury pad.

Director Bronagh Lagan's production takes a little while to setttle down with a few technical  hiccups - Jordan Shaw gives the most consistent performance from start to finish but all the cast come good with eventually outstanding performances from Jenkins and Saker.

The song most often picked out from this youthful work is the diner parody Sunday of Jon and Larson's real-life mentor Stevie's Sunday from Sunday In The Park With George where the order of Art (with a capital A)  becomes an order of an omelette with no yolks, "That why you're a wait-er!".

That's Stevie as in Stephen Sondheim, not Stevie as in Stevia the sugar-free substitute. A sugar-free substitute being the product at the centre of a doomed advertising industry opportunity which Michael sets up for his friend

But the song we loved was the fast-paced psychobabble of the phone call song with a Country & Western twang, Therapy, yet is there also a touch of old style classic musicals and Sesame Street?

Nik Cottall's excellent versatile set goes a long way to giving the production an atmospheric shape, changing seamlessly from apartment to rooftop to diner to office space and even workshop area.. Ben M Rogers' matches him with (pardon the pun!) spot on lighting which also clearly defines the locations of the various scenes but also adds emotional depth when needed. 

Musical director Gareth Bretherton on keyboards is seen through a gauze screen while the three other members of the band on guitar, bass and drums are up above on the balcony. At one point they also  become participants in the Madison Avenue brainstorming parliament - even those musicians perched above away with the birds! 

This is one of those fascinating evenings where non-cognoscenti like TLT and her motorised chariot (and nearing the end of this review, we still haven't seen Rent!) can appreciate some of the technical processes of a developing musical theatre writer without their eyes glazing over.

Because we also pride ourselves that in terms of musical theatre, we're the ordinary punters with unlearned opinions who nevertheless can google and gather knowledge, we know now that Jonathan Larson sadly died as a result of  undiagnosed Marfan Syndrome.

Despite a few technical glitches and Philip Michael Thomas's choreography feeling a little squeezed into the space, the whole experience, whether with or without the woeful background, was a green light from us - oh, and we look forward to catching Rent if not on the current tour then in a future incarnation!

Review Promises, Promises

Promises, Promises
Book by Neil Simon
Based on the Screenplay by Billy Wilder and IAL Diamond
Music by Burt Bacharach and Hal David

How To Succeed In Business
http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/

It may be a sacrilege but TLT and her own little musical automobile wondered how many in the audience watching Promises, Promises, based on s classic 1960 movie,  were working it out ... "If I had an apartment in New York or even central London for $86.50 a month ..."

But maybe that's the point. The movie on which 1968 musical Promises, Promises is based is Billy Wilder's and IA Diamond's The Apartment. It's the lodging in the title of the film, not the emotion. Promises, Promises felt to us an unusual thing, an angry black comedy, a play, yearning and aching not to be a musical.

Accounts' man in Consolidated Life,  CC Baxter, aka Chuck, rents a snug little apartment in New York but has found his own prudential way, he hopes, to consolidate his own promotion up the slippery corporate ladder.

He lends his key on a rota to various middle aged executives for their extra-marital affairs. Even if this means roaming the streets or taking corporate hospitality tickets for sports' games while he's excluded from what should be his own private domain.

It's only when he falls, hook, line and sinker, for gamine Fran, a waitress in the executive dining room, discovers her entanglement with the boss who monopolizes his pad and the threat to her life that the blinkers of corporate advancement fall off.    

This revival follows a 2010 New York production riding on the Mad Men wave and transfering the action back to 1962. It also added two of Burt Bacharach's and Hal David's best known pop music hits, Say A Little Prayer and A House Is Not A Home, although the former, probably wisely, is cut from director Bronagh Lagan's production.

Billy Wilder, according to that tome on everyone's virtual bookshelf Wikipedia, was apparently partly inspired by Brit movie Brief Encounter where the adulterous couple, a doctor and a housewife, use an apartment belonging to a friend of the medic. But we think Wilder also looked at the way Coward changed the story from his original play Still Life where the romantic male lead in the film on stage is, to be coy ;), a prize louse.

Maybe Wilder and Diamond had an even more savage first draft of The Apartment. Or maybe book writer of the musical Neil Simon was trying to get under the skin of the movie, adding his own political and sexual subtext.

However, especially in the first act, there's a lot of talking for a musical including CC Baxter (the men are great initials' men) speaking directly to the audience making for an uneven tone. It's less moral wavering than a boastful kind of co-conspiracy, even though he's the underdog. 

So problematically, the light touch in the movie becomes heavy handed and, especially in our times, dated on stage. The bevy of attractive oven-ready (it's Christmas and there's a Turkey Lurkey Time song wih all the sexy trimmings) young women secretaries and hostesses parade before overweight, cigar chomping executives with apparently no irony. Unlike, say, Frank Loesser's earlier corporate ladder musical.

Still, Gabriel Vick as Chuck Baxter and Daisy Maywood as Fran Kubelik wisely embrace the shades of Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine with a precise delicacy in looks, word and song despite a book which feels as if it should have been thinned down.

The songs are clever enough but don't feel particularly memorable or dynamic apart from A House Is Not A Home and I'll Never Fall In Love Again, which was in the original 1968 production. However, these two songs, with their pop production values, also stand out awkwardly from the rest  of the piece.

Alex Young brings welcome relief from the dice loaded in favour of men as a feisty, funny widow picking up Chuck in a bar with A Fact Can Be A Beautiful Thing. John Guerrasio as the cooperative doctor and neighbour also brings a worldly-wise (almost TV sitcom-style) expediency into the show.

Cressida Carré's choreography and the dancing are slick and we were quite taken by Simon Wells's almost Dr Caligari-like simple but effective set with Ben M Rogers' projections. At the same time, it's an amber light for a show with a book which, strangely, feels as if it's being scuppered by being a musical.