What do we expect out of a musical? We want imaginative, creative direction but we don't want direction for the sake of it; sometimes you can be imaginative and creative and come up with something that isn't any good. It is easy to confuse imagination and creativity with originality; just because something has come to you from nowhere in a spark of sudden inspiration doesn't mean that it hasn't previously come to a hundred other people or wouldn't come to them if they were in your situation. And even an original idea does not always turn out to be a good one.
What is or should be a director's object in a musical? I don't want always to see everything done in the way I would have thought of, but I do expect a director to have done his or her job with me in mind, in other words to have directed a musical for people who are willing to pay close attention and who want to have that attention rewarded. What annoys me is when a director seems to have thought "that would be good" in the abstract; there is no good apart from what is good for the audience. Inaudibility, for example, is an absolute fault: if I can't hear the words then the director has failed to do the job, no matter what his or her artistic motivation. Showing off is a fault: I may often criticise a director for being incoherent, but I don't think I've ever criticised one for being too self-effacing. A musical that's worth doing at all is worth doing the way that it's written (even if it is also worth doing in other ways).
How much slack should we cut a young, relatively inexperienced director? Some, of course. I'm sure that John Lewin himself looks back on some of his early work and thinks that he could have done it better. I often see musicals directed by established directors who seem to keep getting asked back only because committees are reluctant to give someone new a shot; when you do see a new director it is often someone whose main qualification seems to be that they are an established performer. Sometimes this works well (Phil Simcox, for example), and sometimes it doesn't. So seeing someone direct because they have themselves apparently decided to take the bull by the horns is unquestionably a good thing, and if it happened more often the world would be a better place.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that of course I'm glad that Oliver Metcalfe did Last 5 Years, and I wish him every success, but I still sat there annoyed at his not having done it very well. The two singers were very confident, knew the piece well, and were not apparently reliant on being able to see the musical director (who was playing a hard piano part and not conducting in any case) - so why did the band need to be down the front? If you put them at the back of the stage and moved the whole production six to eight feet towards the audience you transform the show. This is a beautiful and personal and intimate piece; it is built entirely around the characters and the audience's personal connection with them. The closer they are to us the better. The ideal production would be in a small room with no raised stage, just six musicians behind the actors and lightly raked seats. Chad's Octagon would be absolutely ideal for it. If you are going to lift it away from the audience you need to keep that intimacy. Catherine Orton's production at that benighted leisure centre two years ago was an absolute model. It occurs to me to wonder whether they intended until they got to the dress rehearsal to use the pit under the stage; that would explain why neither of the performers set foot on the board which covers it all evening. Even if they did, the correct solution should have been obvious when they got into the theatre.
Of course, if you'd done that then you wouldn't have been able to bring the tabs across to change the set slightly in the middle and then change it back again. But why did you want to do that? What does it add? It just distracts. It isn't even textually defensible; the middle set (for the wedding) has a cross at the back but Jamie wouldn't get married in a church; as we establish at the beginning, he's Jewish and seems to be if not observant at the very least still actively immersed in Jewish culture (all those Shabbas dinners in Washington Heights). The whole thing is designed to work on one set that never moves or changes; trust that and your other problems go away.
So, the performers. Oliver Metcalfe is certainly talented but on this evidence is not multi-dimensional; we got a whole evening of the bow-wow style, popular on Broadway (or at least on Broadway cast recordings) but not yielding the sort of subtlety that I would have enjoyed, and were left with the impression that he was playing no-one but himself. It seemed of a piece with the performance that he had made no visible costume effort at all; it isn't very hard to dress plausibly like a 20-something New Yorker in the late 1990s or early 2000s but he didn't do it (they didn't wear their jeans down below the hips like 18-year-olds do nowadays). And he didn't go to any lengths to look Jewish either; it can't be impossible to dye your hair dark for a week (although I admit that it might be difficult, especially if you want the original colour back at the end of the week). I know I'm carping but I have high standards! What he could have done with was a director; anyone directing themselves in leading role is always going to end up being self-indulgent. Perhaps it works best when you are playing a character who is designed to work when self-centred (I'm thinking of Shane Perry's Sweeney and his Mack Sennett), but the difficulty of playing Jamie is that he seems like such a horrible person - a self-directed performer is only likely to slip further in this direction, it seems to me.
Jessica Nicklin. Aaaaaaah Jessica Nicklin.
Jessica Nicklin was absolutely splendid. We expect no less, of course. I love agile communicative performers. Cathy walks a fine line between appealingly vulnerable and shakeworthy doormat and we had just about the right balance.
Her costumes also looked pretty hastily assembled but she looked the part (she can only be 18 but didn't have any trouble coming across a few years older) and her accent was stable; this has been a problem in the past, wandering around the South and everywhere else in Best Little Whorehouse in Texas last year, but she seemed to have it pretty well nailed for Wizard of Oz and it was fine again here.
I like nothing more than unashamedly serious character-driven musicals and I'm in favour of young people and of trying something; so why am I half-hearted about having enjoyed this production? Is it because I find actively bad direction, identifiable mistakes, more annoying than passively bad direction? Because I don't like Jamie? Because it just turned up at the wrong time for me to get the most out of it? I don't know. I find myself in the odd position of seemingly having more to criticise than to praise but also of thinking that whatever we might have had differently, we unquestionably in a broad sense need more of this sort of thing.
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