Transcript
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Mickey Jo (1:45)
Oh my God. Hey, welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Or hello to you if you're listening on podcast platforms. My name is Mickey Jo and I am obsessed with all things theat. I am a professional theatre critic here on social media and today we're going to be talking all about London's newest new musical. It opened just the other side of the weekend back on Friday of last week. It is Sing street at the Lyric Hammersmith. And if you are watching this from over the other side of the Atlantic, you may have heard of Sing street before because even though this is based on an Irish film from 2016 and it is now having its premiere in London, it has already been seen in North America. And in fact this show has a fascinating almost Broadway history because it was a Covid cancellation set to open in New York on Broadway, a transfer from off Broadway in March 2020. Obviously that was unfortunately preempted by the pandemic and the theatrical shutdown and unlike many other productions that were brought back Sing street never actually made it to Broadway. However, perhaps that is now on the horizon with this London production and despite the fact that I have not yet seen the film upon which it is based. I know, I apologize. If I was being a good little theatre critic, I would have done my homework. It's been a very busy July and I will get round it at some point. I have many, many thoughts about Sing street as a stage musical, about the very talented young cast, about the score, about these songs, about the story and about the structural curiosity within it. And there is plenty for us to talk about. But as always, for us to have a full conversation about Sing street as a musical, then I need your thoughts as well. If you have already had the chance to see this show either recently at the Lyric Hammersmith or either of the North American productions, that is the Off Broadway run or I believe a run in Boston in 2022, please let me know what you think about the show. Comments section down below. Did you have tickets to see it on Broadway that got cancelled? Let us know. In the meantime, I will be bringing you all of my thoughts about this show and if you want to hear my thoughts about other shows opening soon, both in the West End and on Broadway, make sure you're subscribed to my theatre themed YouTube channel or following me on podcast platforms. In the meantime, let's talk about Sing Street. So let's talk through the narrative of this show and it's not overly complicated. It's Based on the 2016 film of the same name, written and directed by John Carney. Set in 1980s Dublin, it's a coming of age story for our young protagonist, who is the youngest of three children of a couple living in Dublin. We are introduced to a community dealing with significant challenges as a result of unemployment and austerity and an entire generation of aspirational young people who are considering traveling to the United Kingdom, traveling across the sea, going to London even, in order to find for themselves a more affluent and promising life. Though that isn't necessarily the focus of our young protagonist Connor. When we meet him, he is more concerned with the fact that he is having to transfer to a different school because money is getting tight for his constantly arguing parents. And given that they can no longer afford his tuition fees, he has to go to a different school which is called like Singe Street. I'm probably mispronouncing this, it's S Y N G E Street, hence the pun with the title. And it's a Christian Brotherhood school, which in this particular instance means that the staff there are religious, strict, and just kind of insane. Upon arrival, he is almost immediately punished by one particularly strict teacher. And due to the nature of staging this theatrically, the only teacher who we end up meeting of his during the show because they have a black shoe policy and he is wearing brown shoes, he does his best to explain that they can't afford black shoes. But because of his circumstances and the transfer, there is this assumption that he is from a wealthy background and they sort of have preconceptions about him to begin with. And when I say they, I mean both the teacher and a couple of other students at the school. And so Connor is principally concerned with just surviving this environment, especially after he finds himself very quickly coming face to face with an aggressive bully, as well as a young woman at the school who is about a year older than him, who he encounters in a phone box who tells him that she is a model. He suggests that he has a band and can write a song for her about her. And so he then has to go about finding a band and doing just that. And that is what the plot of this show becomes. It's about him as a young person in this fraught environment. Environment, both his school life and his home life, using the joy of music and songwriting and rebellion in order to feel alive, in order to express himself, and in order to try and go after the girl that he has a crush on. It's incredibly nostalgic in that way. It's that familiar throwback joy. I say familiar. I didn't do any of these things in my childhood. I was a pretentious teenager who had just discovered Sondheim. But it's that thing of being young and finding a community of friends and creating something together, making your first band and writing songs and having that first young love. There's something just joyous and buoyant about the whole thing that allows it to float above the rest of the plot, which is otherwise quite stark and reasonably depressing. And that is one of the best things, I think, that Sing street has going for it. It's an uplifting story. It has a bit of the Billy Elliots about it as well. This one doesn't want to dance at the ballet, but what he does want to do is to make music and to go after the girl that he likes. And so he isn't really engaging fully or completely understanding complicated dynamics within his family. He doesn't know what it means for his brother to have tried to run away years ago and for now to be basically experiencing agoraphobia and be trapped inside his house and be constantly reprimanded by his father for never leaving and making something of himself because his parents caught him trying to leave years earlier and stopped him. He doesn't really understand as much as his siblings do that his parents are on the brink of getting a divorce and that his mother is potentially having an affair. And that's because at this point, although Connor legitimately has an awful lot to deal with, his world is small enough that his principal problems seem huge. And those principal problems are, what is the aesthetic of our band going to be? You know, how are we going to record our next music video? And how do I get this girl to kiss me? That's where he is at this point. And over the course of the show, he will have to reckon with many of the realities of his situation and his home life, and more of this will come to a head. But it's a satisfying story in which, funnily enough, the answers to so many of his problems can be found in music and the songs that he writes and plays with his friends and what fantastic songs they are. We'll talk momentarily about the material, but before we do, another thing I really enjoy about this show is that I think it is powerfully cross generational. I think there is something very nostalgic about it for everyone who is now a little bit older, but grew up in the 80s and remembers making a band, remembers that first crush. But I also think that the nature of this and these characters and the way that it centralizes them and Connor within the plot hopefully will endear it very much to young audiences. And that's always the greatest thing that I hope for for these shows which are focused on young protagonists and which have this sort of a riotous, dynamic and contemporary energy. I hope that young people find this show and just love it and go back and back and back. Anyway, as promised, let's carry on. Let's talk a little bit about the material. So we're going to talk about the material. We're going to talk about the book and the structure of this story. And we're also going to talk about the songs, those which have been carried over from the original film as well as those which have been added, I believe, specific for this production. Like since the previous runs which the show has had, if you've listened to the cast recording, there are a couple of differences and a couple of completely new songs as well as that. Now, in terms of who we are crediting here with the writing of all of this, John Carney Like I said, is the original writer and director of the film. He is also the co composer and co lyricist of the songs that you hear in that and in this, along with Gary Clark, who is also credited with the orchestrations and arrangements with Peter Gordino. Now, the actual adaptation of the film has been written for the stage production by Ender Walsh, whose name you may recognized from another stage adaptation of a musically inclusive, celebrated Irish film. Once. Now, the original story for the film is credited to John Carney as well as Simon Carmody. And I think the narrative itself is very strong. It's very cinematic. I imagine it plays very well on film and I would like to watch that film. But there are certain structural choices within the book that do feel a little detrimental in terms of getting to a satisfying narrative. What do I actually mean by that? Well, you have all of these different elements at play. You have the complicated home life with the arguing parents. You have his older sister and the fact that she has all this weight of expectation on her because she's the one studying at university and she is going to make something of her life. You have his brother and all of the shame attached to his situation and the complexity of his mental health. You also have everything that's going on at school with his new friends, with the entrepreneurial one who helps him set everything up, with the brilliant musical genius who's quite shy with whom he writes the songs, but who has his own very stressful home life. You also have the girl that he has a crush on, Rafina, who comes with a tragic backstory to go with her imminent departure. It's all very tense and stressful. You have the school bully, and we come to find out that there is more going on, motivating him to act in the aggressive way that he does. There is more happening there. You also have the abusive teacher. And there's every possibility that all of these elements would have worked well in the context of a film. In a musical of roughly a similar duration, we are spending more time singing. And so we don't really have the opportunity to invest as substantially as we need to in all of these characters. I also think that you can achieve slightly more on film. And it matters less if you have these characters who we never really get to know. And I think it's a shame that we don't find out really anything of detail about the other boys in the band, because those are the most satisfying and the most energizing scenes and sequences when they are filming these music videos, when they are becoming a band. And when they are expressing themselves and finding themselves and becoming a more cohesive group. But we keep cutting away from that because we have a great many of the characters and plot lines to attend to. And the one that is the most frustrating is every time we go back to his home life and his parents, there is an awful lot of time spent with his brother. And in fact, he also gets the final word. He has a big song in the Middle of the Thing in which he articulates musically his complicated, angsty feelings about the life that he could have had that he now feels is too far away. And it riffs around the ideas of freedom a lot in the lyrics. And I think he does absolutely add something of value to the narrative. I dispute whether the sister character does whatsoever. Admittedly, if you were to cut the sister, then there is one fewer female character in an already very male dominated story. But I just don't think that she adds anything. I think the material that she does have in this feels almost farcically melodramatic. There's one sequence where she likes is throwing her textbook around and saying that she doesn't want to do this anymore. She's acting out in response to disappointing news from their parents. Their parents, who are also kind of problematic because they're so thinly sketched in this as well. There is very little depth to their material. And his older brother becomes this surrogate parent figure to him. Because his parents don't have the capacity to be parents at this time. They're so busy arguing about money and have you been drinking? And they're fighting again. But we encounter them so infrequently and always in such a shallow context that they lack any kind of meaning. And the relationship between him and his brother is the most important, really the only important dynamic at play here. Because he doesn't seem to care about what his parents will say if he were to run away, if he were to get punished at school. This doesn't really register or affect him whatsoever. But he really listens to the advice of his brother. Both when it's about the bigger picture, ideas of how he's going to make his way in the world and what kind of a life he wants to lead, as well as how to get this girl to like him as well as what their group should look like. His brother is the musically interested one who gives him a little bit of guidance about what their band ought to be and how to create this group and these songs. And honestly, I think there's even an argument to be made for A version of this in which his parents are this unseen force in which we as an audience are able to feel the extent to which they aren't emotionally present in his life whatsoever due to their absence on stage. If these were characters who were talked about or represented in some other way, but we only see his proximal relationship with his brother, I actually think that could be more effective rather than having them walk on every few scenes just to argue with each other in the same way that they did a few scenes before and not look him in the eye. And yet, for all the time that we spend with Brendan, I feel like there are still unanswered emotional questions. And the way in which the show actually concluded left me more than a little bit puzzled. Let me tell you about why this is obviously going to come with a spoiler war. So as we're heading through the second act, everything is beginning to go wrong. And the band have been arguing and they have been caught and punished by the abusive teacher for filming without permission on school property, for creating one of their music videos. And once they regroup, they make the decision to surprise him on stage with a rebellious performance of a fantastic song in which they sing about his hypocrisy, which is a really fantastic moment. It's probably the most satisfying of the entire show, right next to the filming of all of their music videos. And it's up there with, like, nobody puts Baby in a corner in terms of how satisfying it is. You have them storming the stage, they're wearing masks with his face on, and it's this punk, rebellious song. I do wish, as a random note that the melody of the chorus was echoed by other members of the band, which is something that they do occasionally in terms of the vocal arrangements, just because it sits a little bit lower. And so it doesn't have as much emphasis as some of the other melodies that they sing. But it's such a fantastic moment. The hand gets overplayed a little bit here, though, because they then do two more songs. And at this point we are situated as the audience to be. Because it's some sort of end of term presentation celebration, whatever it may be. And they've crashed this ceremony and we are the actual audience in this context. And the teacher has been lured off stage and we're cheering for it and it's euphoric and we're clapping along to these outstanding songs. But they do, at this point, three songs. And I can forgive a set of that length of just diegetic material, which means within the context of the musical. They are actually, you know, playing and singing songs. If this were basically the end of the show, if this would tantamount to a curtain call. And this was just the downhill of like, we're now just going to enjoy this band for a few songs. But it's puzzling because there's then a whole ending that happens after that. And when he sings the third song, it is for Rafina. And it's this.