Living in a Minor Key
I have recently seen two Sydney Theatre Company productions that included music, but were not musicals. The first, When the Rain Stops Falling, was a play that included an original score played live by a pianist on the apron of the stage. The music worked like a film soundtrack to underscore the emotional intensity of the action onstage, and I loved it. It was a very lyrical play, cleverly staged with a brilliant set and blocking to slide effortlessly between scenes and timelines. The play concerns several generations of one family, the ways that parents are cruel to children and children cruel to parents, the patterns that repeat even when you don't realise it, and the patterns that you can try to break, sometimes consciously or sometimes not. I love the way that Andrew Bovell writes intense, long speeches that are nonetheless believable; his characters are real but provide such meat for the actors. The music was almost unnecessary because the words pack all the punches, but it rounded out the atmosphere.
That being said, the play's symbolism was rather heavy at times, and the final line of the play is an absolute howler. And while there is some labouring exposition towards the end, I was left wanting to know more about the last generation, whose story was not told in full. (It may seem that I cared less for this play because I have less to say about it, but in fact it was the best piece of theatre I have seen in a very long time. To discuss it in greater depth would spoil it majorly for anyone who may see a future production.)
The second production, Poor Boy, is 'a play with songs' by Matt Cameron and Tim Finn. It too concerns fractured families, but with a supernatural theme: reincarnation. It's not spoiling much to say that a seven-year-old boy wakes up one day and says he is not himself but a man who died seven years earlier. That man is played by Matthew Newton, who shadows the boy onstage. They alternate lines and sometimes speak together, they wear the same clothes and are the same person but they move independently. I liked this doubling, although it did pull the focus in a lot of scenes, when everyone onstage would be looking at the boy but it was Matthew who was speaking, and he was somewhere else on stage entirely. The play raises more questions than it can safely answer, although it too suffered from too much exposition, especially around a crucial scene that was described twice and also re-enacted. Of course there were different details in each version, but three times is too much, especially if you're going to both show and tell.
I'm really not familiar with Tim Finn's work, which was probably to my advantage. I loved the lyrical complexity of the songs, but I don't think they were integrated as well as they could have been. Often a scene would end with a dramatic line, the lights would go down, then the lights would come up and there would be a song, which then became quite predictable. I had the sense that the songs were largely unaltered from the original pop recording, without appropriate changes to the lyrics or the musical arrangement, so the female actors often had to sing quite low and strong pop elements remained. I'm not going to lie, when Matthew Newton's character was left onstage softly singing, "C'mon c'mon c'mon", at the end of a song it was one of my favourite moments in the entire show, but it didn't have a lot to do with his character or anything else happening at the time. The boy can really sing, though. The whole cast does a wonderful job with the music. Of course, they had to wear mikes because of the singing, and I would much rather have heard their unadorned voices for the dialogue, but I guess that's unavoidable. The onstage band was also a little too loud for me, but it was only the second show after opening night so I expect the techs are still adjusting the levels.
The final problem of it being a play with songs rather than a musical was that no one ever seemed to know what to do after a song, especially if there wasn't a blackout. In a musical, characters sing when their emotions reach a certain height, and it's part of the conventions of the genre. In a play, do we pretend that the songs didn't happen? Do the characters realise that they are singing? Are they meant to hear each other? These questions aside, I'm all for experimentation with music and other elements in a performance. A play doesn't always have to be just a play -- as long as there's a reason for doing something different. I loved the musical element to When the Rain Stops Falling and feel that it wouldn't have been such a strong production without it. However, I'm not convinced that the same goes for Poor Boy.
That being said, the play's symbolism was rather heavy at times, and the final line of the play is an absolute howler. And while there is some labouring exposition towards the end, I was left wanting to know more about the last generation, whose story was not told in full. (It may seem that I cared less for this play because I have less to say about it, but in fact it was the best piece of theatre I have seen in a very long time. To discuss it in greater depth would spoil it majorly for anyone who may see a future production.)
The second production, Poor Boy, is 'a play with songs' by Matt Cameron and Tim Finn. It too concerns fractured families, but with a supernatural theme: reincarnation. It's not spoiling much to say that a seven-year-old boy wakes up one day and says he is not himself but a man who died seven years earlier. That man is played by Matthew Newton, who shadows the boy onstage. They alternate lines and sometimes speak together, they wear the same clothes and are the same person but they move independently. I liked this doubling, although it did pull the focus in a lot of scenes, when everyone onstage would be looking at the boy but it was Matthew who was speaking, and he was somewhere else on stage entirely. The play raises more questions than it can safely answer, although it too suffered from too much exposition, especially around a crucial scene that was described twice and also re-enacted. Of course there were different details in each version, but three times is too much, especially if you're going to both show and tell.
I'm really not familiar with Tim Finn's work, which was probably to my advantage. I loved the lyrical complexity of the songs, but I don't think they were integrated as well as they could have been. Often a scene would end with a dramatic line, the lights would go down, then the lights would come up and there would be a song, which then became quite predictable. I had the sense that the songs were largely unaltered from the original pop recording, without appropriate changes to the lyrics or the musical arrangement, so the female actors often had to sing quite low and strong pop elements remained. I'm not going to lie, when Matthew Newton's character was left onstage softly singing, "C'mon c'mon c'mon", at the end of a song it was one of my favourite moments in the entire show, but it didn't have a lot to do with his character or anything else happening at the time. The boy can really sing, though. The whole cast does a wonderful job with the music. Of course, they had to wear mikes because of the singing, and I would much rather have heard their unadorned voices for the dialogue, but I guess that's unavoidable. The onstage band was also a little too loud for me, but it was only the second show after opening night so I expect the techs are still adjusting the levels.
The final problem of it being a play with songs rather than a musical was that no one ever seemed to know what to do after a song, especially if there wasn't a blackout. In a musical, characters sing when their emotions reach a certain height, and it's part of the conventions of the genre. In a play, do we pretend that the songs didn't happen? Do the characters realise that they are singing? Are they meant to hear each other? These questions aside, I'm all for experimentation with music and other elements in a performance. A play doesn't always have to be just a play -- as long as there's a reason for doing something different. I loved the musical element to When the Rain Stops Falling and feel that it wouldn't have been such a strong production without it. However, I'm not convinced that the same goes for Poor Boy.