Review Working

Working
From the book by Studs Terkel
Adapted by Stephen Schwartz and Nina Faso
With additional contributions by Gordon Greenberg
Songs by Craig Carnelia, Micki Grant, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Mary Rodgers and Susan Birkenhead, Stephen Schwartz and James Taylor

Boom And Bust
http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/

There's an iconic photo of American blue-collar workers taken during the 20th century - aka The American Century.  Iron workers are balancing precariously on a girder on one of the top floors of a skyscraper they are constructing high above New York City,

Surely skyscrapers are the pyramids of our times - except of course they weren't built by Jewish slaves but usually a diverse workforce as the vital cogs in the wheel of construction.

The fame of these American construction workers spread far and wide even infiltrating James Joyce's famously often inpenetrable masterpiece Finnegans Wake "Bygmester Finnegan ... freeman's maurer .... this man of hod, cement and edifices ... piled bildung supra bildung pon the banks ... rise in undress maisonry upstanded (joygrantit!) a waalworth of a skyerscape ..."

So it fits the bill when Peter Polycarpou's Mike Dillard with an apron filled with his iron worker's tools takes to the stage to echo 19th century poet Walt Whitman's iconic (yes, there's a lot of iconic here) poem, I Hear America Singing/All The Live Long Day (music and lyrics Stephen Schwartz)

But Mike also comes from a bygone age of trades passed on from father to son, as if standing on the shoulders of giants, a dynasty of manual workers who, by virtue of their fearlessness about heights, did a job that others couldn't do.

Working is based on a series of real-life interviews conducted by veteran Chicago journalist and social historian Studs Terkel, which he then carefully crafted by ordering them into a best-selling non-fiction 1974 book.

Stephen (Wicked, Godspell) Schwartz, inspired by the success of similar oral testimony-based The Me Nobody Knows and the semi-fictional A Chorus Line, decided to make a musical out it. He brought in his own collective of music and lyric writers including James (You've Got A Friend) Taylor and Mary (Once Upon A Mattress) Rodgers and selected a cross-section of workers' testimonies.

Working in some ways reflects the strengths and weaknesses of the published book and musical form. The narrative line is less a story than the turning of a page to pick up a fresh interview.

There are subtext twists and turns - the iron worker, the mason, the press agent and the fireman all serve as markers in ground, we felt -  but TLT and her automotive product of British industry companion could feel the possibility of a different running order in a musical that never quite slots together.

Nevertheless the nuts and bolts are the performers and this is a fine production directed by Luke Sheppard with inventive and never over-fussy choreography in a compact space by Fabian Aloise.

Gillian Bevan in "Nobody Tells Me How" (lyrics Susan Birkenhead, music Mary Rodgers) is the elderly second generation American from an immigrant family teaching Elementary School and the waitress infected by showbusiness in "It's An Art".

Dean Chisnall is the stone mason in "The Mason" (lyrics and music Craig Carnelia) who notices any stone that's put in crooked, even if he can't change it, and the former bank worker who has willingly  forsaken dealing with unreal digits for saving human lives as a fireman   

There are obvious points made but also some deeper implicit realism and understanding about change. The two striking turns by Liam Tamne point this up - one more subtly than the other. The successful (presumably unpaid) community activist, in Tamne's and this production's interpretation, feels like a former trade unionist who has turned to communal matters and has the air of a business motivational speaker fitting in with our times.

Much more disturbingly there are the violent flip flops in manner of an ex-newspaper copyboy (given a pseudonym in Terkel's book) who - even if he never seems to have implemented his wildest threats - almost could have stepped out of Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's Assassins and also feels all too real in today's world.

At the same time, Working feels like an elegaic look at an industrial past and its decline which isn't quite flagged up enough as a period piece because it sets out to be a documentary musical. Even since 2012, when director Gordon Greenberg gave some  updates along with songwriter Lin-Manuel Miranda, the world of work, including work for women, and leisure has changed drastically.

Nevertheless the creatives obviously know this, introducing a polished chorus of current drama school graduates who also act as a wide-eyed, if somewhat unironic, audience for the Terkel interviews transformed into song.

It may be unfair but of course more current issues like zero-hours fake self-employment forced upon folks but presented as a choice are non-existent. Neither is there unpaid or under-paid work posing as "internships".  Despite the 2012 updates, this is a piece more from the time long ago when interns only meant paid young doctors gaining hospital experience. 

Another problem inherent in Working is that it is too easy to forget in this musical rendition that these are real interviews. The cast just sing and dance too well and there's a tendency towards the sentimental.    

Of course there are many employment issues which were not foreseeable when the musical was first conceived. Things have moved and move so fast now - not least  the shark-like possibility new media companies might become huge with the aim of having hardly any employees at all, however inept or dangerous it may be.

While it definitely does retain a resonance, events seem to have outpaced the framework of Working, making it both a glorious but grating musical for us, so it's an amber/green light.  

Review Children Of Eden

Children of Eden

Book by John Caird

Music and Lyrics by Stephen Schwartz

Based on a concept by Charles Lisanby

The Generation Game

 http://www.uniontheatre.biz/

Along to The Union Theatre, that little ark of musicals which punches above its weight (a mixed metaphor if ever there was one!) for Children of Eden. Giving a new slant to ancient stories, this biblical musical uses the infinitely flexible dramatic framework of the Old Testament, the story of Adam and Eve and then Noah and The Flood.

To be honest, biblical musicals do not always rock our boat, so it was something of a surprise when we found ourselves gripped and, yes, unexpectedly moved by this many-layered fascinating show, directed here with panache and sensitivity by Christian Durham. 

Created by New Yorker Steven "Wicked" Schwartz and English director John "Les Miz" and "Nicholas Nickleby" Caird, this piece has at its core the initially joyous and then choppy and poignant relationship between parent and child and casts an Anglo-American eye on the Book of Genesis.

God, always called The Father in the show, is a Brit (a haughty yet affectionate Joey Dexter) and more like a clean cut corporate Chief Executive, General or modern King cum President, or a kind of Platonic financial regulator - and, above all, a human Dad. 

Yet his complacent best-laid plans go awry when he puts into practice his ideas. He's also a God who, as Children of Eden progresses, shows himself without the experience of sharing his life with an equal. In the end, without an absolute resolution, the Children of Eden have something to teach him.

The show has a chequered history and received less than kind reviews when it rushed into production in 1991 in an available but outsize theatre in London. With audiences then staying away, glued to their TV sets watching coverage of The First Gulf War,  it took several re-writes, community theatre and youth productions to produce the present version.

After a bit of a cheesy beginning (the show rather than the performers), TLT and her own right-hand fired-up chariot found their initial resistance broken down.  The child-like rhythms and simple tunes build up into something more complex as they reflect the increasing complexity and perplexity of this world from joyously newly minted to multifaceted experience. 

But maybe this makes it sound more complicated than it should for a bitter sweet lyrical tale with characterful choreography by Lucie Pankhurst which takes an audience of diverse belief and non-belief with it. 

American-accented Adam and Eve (Stephen Barry and Natasha O'Brien capturing affectively snub-nosed, wide-eyed infant delight in character and song)  joyously partake in everything around them.

Musical director Inga Davis-Rutter plays keyboard in the four-piece band which also includes bass, drums and reeds. In a pleasingly unmicrophoned performance, occasionally words do get lost but this is outweighed by clarity in the narrative and otherwise strong singing and affecting harmonies. 

The score carries the story through like links in the chain with inventive staging by Durham and design by Kingsley Hall with pastel nursery colours changing to harder edged grays and reds.

The journey starts from The Father's mighty preliminary act of imagination "Let It Be" put into reality  through Adam and Eve's entry into Eden with the diverting "The Naming" of animals, the first unaswerable question, all  leading naturally to Eve's divination of a pulsating living world with the possiblity of change in "The Spark of Creation".

The song titles give a clue that the chase for fulfilment is as much about new found lands and creative human aspiration through the company of others, in music or in any walk of life as Godly injunction. 

Gabriel Mokake as the snake brings humour, verve and a credible argument, along with the storytelling chorus, for eating the apple of knowledge in "The Pursuit of Excellence". 

And this is a show which brings dramatic life to fundamental arguments with reason, passion and lyricism on all sides within a family circle rippling out over generations.  

With a dynamic take onthe striking down by Cain (young Turk Guy Woolf) of Abel (wide-eyed Daniel Miles) destined never to reach manhood, the first act of the family saga ends in a touching plea by elderly widowed matriarch Eve for "second chances" fearing For yet taking pride in the brood of her creation. 

The second act is deliberately less fluent, the knots in the human story, as The Father seeks his ideal, become knottier and knottier. The first African-inflected song Generations introduces economically the passage of time and spreading of flourishing human tribes around the planet.

Yet the thread is continued by the doubling of the actors as the descendants of Adam and Eve and the contact with The Father ebbing and flowing as the humans pursue their own course. 

The story is followed though with the tale of Noah and Mama Noah, The Flood and youngest son Japeth (Guy Woolf again), defying his father to take the servant girl Yonah (Nikita Johal, with a native American look, stepping out of the storyteller chorus) as his bride. 

She becomes his wife - and equal - with the aspiration for the ideal always kept alive. Nevertheless there remains a troubling messier hurt, an irresolvable, contradictory unease alongside a story of release and redemption for future generations, giving this piece its modern currency. 

So, as we're only human, we award a green light for an enchanting, fresh minted take on ancient tales.