Review 13 The Musical

13 The Musical
Music & Lyrics by Jason Robert Brown
Book By Dan Elish & Robert Horn

Your Town Becomes Our Town
http://bit.ly/13themusical

There's a young newcomer in an Indiana town at Dan Quayle Junior High and within this institution's walls are the jocks, the popular girls (aka mean girls), the nerds and the geeks - and now there's Evan.

13 is probably every fish-out-of-water comedy drama/sitcom and middle and high school musical you've ever seen (or not seen) with a touch of South Park to boot.

Yet this is a true children's musical -  all the roles are the age of the title - and the show therefore relies on the charm of its cast.

Luckily the present production has a cast, directed and skilfully choreographed by Ewan Jones, with spadefuls of it, even as the show itself lays on the clichés in digger truck loads.

Evan is just about to turn 13 and apart from a zit or two, life seems unproblematic in metropolitan Manhattan. Then pow! His parents divorce and kapow! His mother whisks him off, for unexplained reasons, to Appleton, Indiana.

At 13 such problems may be magnified into a horror movie in teenage minds (there's Carrie, that other high school musical to verify that). 

So we follow Evan, hailed and then derided as "the Brain" and two other young misfit Indiana natives, Patrice and Archie, in their various The Wonder Years' missteps and victories until everyone gets their priorities sorted and are ready to start on the business of Life with a capital L.

Milo Panni makes an exceptionally cute Evan who finds himself the victim of his own schemes to make himself popular. Madeline Banbury as fellow outcast Patrice proves a polished, confident performer right from her first solo "The Lamest Place In The World".

Ethan Quinn, previously seen in Ragtime, is an engagingly kooky Archie, a cross between Tiny Tim, the lame boy in the Pied Piper of Hamelin and a dark-humoured stand up comedian in "Get Me What I Need".and "Terminal Illness".

There's able support from Lewis Ledlie as the school jock and Chloe Endean as the school's cheerleading object of desire. Isabelle Pappas also delivers the goods as the jealous friend whose power of rumour mongering in "It Can't Be True" would be the envy of many an underhand politician 

There's an entertaining-in-its-own-right backdrop (along the lines of Saul Steinberg's famous New Yorker cover) design from Tom Paris and excellent lighting and sound from Edward Pagett and Andrew Johnson.   

Now the nitpicking.This production embraces the conventional tropes of the high school genre, life-and-soul-of-the-party popularity, "All Hail The Brain!", finding who your true friends are. "

But maybe the clever ceremonial but heartfelt message and juxtaposition in Becoming A Man in the midst of acrimonious divorcing parents "I don't know what a man means/The rule book grows, but noone knows/What all the rules allow" and the final "A Little More Homework to do"  become a bit lost.

There was also a bit of unevenness in diction with a couple of the male leads at the beginning which did wear away as the show progressed. There was certainly a good balance between Chris Ma's four-piece band of keyboards, guitar, bass and drums.

But this is  TLT and her (sole) automotive clique member being picky, This is an intricate show, needing spot-on timing, mastered well by an accomplished young cast.

It's certainly an enjoyable show with enough edge (especially in the light of current events in the USA) to keep a wide age range entertained during the school summer holidays and it's a green light. 

Review The Last Five Years

The Last Five Years
by Jason Robert Brown

A Final Chapter
https://www.stjamestheatre.co.uk

The Last Five Years is a gauzy ribboned confection with a bitter pill underneath the wrapping. This two-hander charting the coupledom of novelist Jamie (Jonathan Bailey) and actress Cathy (Samantha Barks), an almost totally sung-through American musical, first performed in 2001, after an intial stumble has become a worldwide success.

It's a piece for a post-war generation - that is post Vietnam War and the many conflicts since then, all boiled down to the short-lived marriage of writer and aspiring actress in New York whose lives and careers are structurally opposed within the piece.

In some ways, this is a modern version of Romeo and Juliet, with the death of love rather than the lovers and an unintended career war between an agented published writer and a performer still on the audition roundabout. A portion of each of the couple's souls are sliced, diced and wither by the undoubted success of Jewish author Jamie and the relative career failure of Irish Catholic Cathy. 

Directed by the composer Jason Robert-Brown, the scenery is minimal. With musicians led by musical director Torquil Munroe on scaffolding above, loft apartment brickwork slide open to bring forward a desk, a door, at one instance a boat and nicely understated use of video footage (Jeff Sugg).

Samantha Barks brings heartrending and humorous soaring vocals to the role of Cathy. She's well-matched by Jonathan Bailey's Jamie whose initial infectious charm and over-confidence hardens into darker ambition and infidelity. 

Like Harold Pinter's Betrayal and Stephen Sondheim and George Furth's Merrily We Roll Along  (the song Moving Too Fast perhaps has an oblique reference to the latter), we're given a rewind, as well as a play forward, of the romance and rupture.

Cathy is the musical's catalyst. The first song is her realisation Jamie her husband has left her, Still Hurting, "Jamie decides it’s his right to decide/Jamie’s got secrets he doesn’t confide/ And I’m still hurting.” Her story runs backwards to the dawn of love when life seemed far more straightforward.

From the first, despite the beauty of the songs in a range of styles,  there's sour with the sweet. Principally it's Jamie, whose story runs in chronological order, who is allowed to inscribe his version to the outside world. Even if it is Cathy who catches the complexity of tone at the beginning, realising how lies and authorship interact and now characterise her life.

For throughout the relationship, it is male writer Jamie telling female actress Cathy who she is. From the simple  crassness where, nevertheless, his energy provides wit, of Shiksa Goddess  "I'd say, 'Hey! Hey! Shiksa goddess!/I've been waiting for someone like.../You, breaking the circle/You, taking the light/You, you are the story/I should write/I have to write!'.

Jamie even assumes the garb of secular rabbidom (there are sly glimpses of Fiddler On The Roof in the musical arrangements and staging) combined with a fairy storyteller in Tbe Schmeul Song.

There he spins a Danny Kaye/Sylvia Fine-type yarn (although the song sweetly stands on its two feet without knowing that) by the light of a fully decked-out Christmas tree, apparently instructing Cathy what she should do to succeed.

The couple only come together musically on stage in a marriage duet "The Next 10 minutes" on a Central Park boating lake where the moment after there's a touch of The Lady Of Shalott drifting off to Camelot as Cathy is sent off in the boat alone.

At the same time Jamie's "If I Didn't Believe" just misses crossing with Cathy's disappointment with her audition in "Climbing Uphill" and marks the point when his glib career-politicking and domestic life merge, as he distances himself from her and what he sees as failure.

The tale of the one left behind is not of course original: A Star Is Born being a prime example. But this piece juxtaposes and sets at odds two separate but not unrelated professions, author and performer.

Maybe the individual stories are not always a tight metaphorical fit but there is more than enough wit and romance in the one-act 90-minute score and book for performers to scoop up and make them their own without the audience having to worry about that.  It's a green light for a tender, bittersweet intimate tale of love and betrayal with a steely core at its centre.