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tick tick BOOM! (Masked Productions)
Oct. 12th, 2022 09:07 amThis was originally Jonathan Larson's (the author/composer of RENT) solo piece, reworked after his death by David Auburn into a three actor piece. In it, Jon is facing his 30th birthday without having made his creative breakthrough; his girlfriend Susan wants to get out of New York, and his best friend Michael has left acting for financial success in a marketing career. Jon has a workshop of his musical, SUPERBIA, coming up though, and maybe this will be his breakthrough...
The cast were great - the actors playing Michael and Susan play everybody else, sometimes swapping when one of them can't get off the stage and changed fast enough, with one moment when the musicians put down their instruments and join them as employees of the marketing department (they are obviously thrilled to be on stage speaking, and make the most of their chance to deliver such classic lines as "the fax machine is jammed again" :D ). Jon is a little irritating and self-obsessed (and to be fair I think the play knows this) - there's a bit at the beginning where he's agonising over his birthday where he says that in 1990 in New York he and all his generation need a war or a depression to give them something to build character that I found particularly galling given the impact of HIV/AIDs at that time, and although this does get a reference later it's still about the effect on Jon rather than as a distinct problem. I gather the recent movie adaptation with Andrew Garfield does more with this.
There's a bit I read in the program to Blood Brothers where Willy Russell, the author, is agonising over whether his songs are "hummable", and how he finally chases one of his children to school to check whether they were in fact humming one of his songs - and on that line, this musical as a musical was pretty slight. I did look up Andrew Garfield singing "Green Green Dress", but at least partly to see what they did with the rather difficult to visualise lyric "twenty buttons and a strap" (like the performance I saw, they wisely ignored it), but the other songs, though clever, don't linger.
(oh! another great touch with this performance - in the theatre lobby, a guy was playing guitar. He came over to us to make sure we could see his sign clearly (a small cardboard one saying "Need $$$ for RENT!" ) and introduced himself as Roger :D )
The cast were great - the actors playing Michael and Susan play everybody else, sometimes swapping when one of them can't get off the stage and changed fast enough, with one moment when the musicians put down their instruments and join them as employees of the marketing department (they are obviously thrilled to be on stage speaking, and make the most of their chance to deliver such classic lines as "the fax machine is jammed again" :D ). Jon is a little irritating and self-obsessed (and to be fair I think the play knows this) - there's a bit at the beginning where he's agonising over his birthday where he says that in 1990 in New York he and all his generation need a war or a depression to give them something to build character that I found particularly galling given the impact of HIV/AIDs at that time, and although this does get a reference later it's still about the effect on Jon rather than as a distinct problem. I gather the recent movie adaptation with Andrew Garfield does more with this.
There's a bit I read in the program to Blood Brothers where Willy Russell, the author, is agonising over whether his songs are "hummable", and how he finally chases one of his children to school to check whether they were in fact humming one of his songs - and on that line, this musical as a musical was pretty slight. I did look up Andrew Garfield singing "Green Green Dress", but at least partly to see what they did with the rather difficult to visualise lyric "twenty buttons and a strap" (like the performance I saw, they wisely ignored it), but the other songs, though clever, don't linger.
(oh! another great touch with this performance - in the theatre lobby, a guy was playing guitar. He came over to us to make sure we could see his sign clearly (a small cardboard one saying "Need $$$ for RENT!" ) and introduced himself as Roger :D )
