… on this trip I have experienced the stage work of the
English director John Tiffany. I wrote about his sublime remount of The Glass Menagerie on Broadway a few
posts ago. And last night, at the Royal Alex in Toronto, my family and I took
in Once, the musical adaptation of
the indie film starring and featuring the music of The Swell Season’s Glen Hansard
and Markéta
Irglová. Tiffany directed this work to acclaim in 2011--also on Broadway, where it is
still playing. Now a North American touring production has just landed in Toronto.
While Once
frequently trades in as many clichés as it upends (not least regarding
ethnicity and gender), what makes it refreshing as a work of romantic musical
theatre is how many of that genre’s apparently unassailable conventions it
eschews. For the Guy and Girl leads (played here by Stuart Ward and Dani de
Waal), there is no star-crossed happy ending (she gets a piano instead). The
performers, who remain on stage throughout the two acts, play all their own
instruments--which, befitting an Irish folk-infused score, are mostly string- and
bellows-heavy (when's the last time you saw a mandolin and a concertina featured in a big-budget musical?). And the movement, by longtime Tiffany collaborator Steve
Hoggett, is deliberately low-key and pedestrian, employing a simple yet richly
symbolic gestural vocabulary to texture a song, but also knowing when to use
stillness in the same context, and combining brief bits of simple group unison
with set and scene changes in a completely fluid and organic way. The mostly
unsentimental book by Irish playwright Enda Walsh demonstrates a similar
plasticity in terms of its relationship to the songs (all of course well-known
from the film), and also manages to get in a clever critique of certain ideologies of
linguistic translation in its use of surtitles.
All of the performers are ridiculously talented. Unlike at
times in John Doyle’s recent Broadway remounts of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and Company, here the fact that the singer-performers also play their
own instruments never feels like a gimmick. Because of course the whole premise
of this story is making beautiful music together--for which everyone involved in
this production deserves kudos.
P.
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