This opera-musical at the Arcola Theatre in East London has a nifty DIY quality, but fails to capitalise on its strengths
Grimeborn is East London’s witty annual riposte to Glyndebourne and country house opera – trading rolling hills and posh frocks for, well, Dalston on a Tuesday night. The festival is a grab-bag of small-scale projects, new companies and young artists, this year ranging from a pocket-sized Tristan und Isolde via a Latin American Tosca to a brand-new eco-opera.
Sneaking in at the very limit of the festival’s operatic remit is Sense and Sensibility: The Musical. Workshopped since 2012, this American-born show has since had runs at Surrey Opera and Cornwall’s Minack Theatre, and now stops off at London on a UK tour that will end at Bath’s Jane Austen Festival next month.
In its most condensed form yet – with a cast of just six singers, piano, violin and cello, a table and a handful of chairs the only set – the show has a nifty, DIY quality. There are knowing nods to characters “never being in the same room” and plenty of breathless costume (and accent) changes, giving Edinburgh Fringe energy.
Austen is an easy win for adaptations, but with so many clever ones around – Pride and Prejudice (sort of), Laura Wade’s meta-theatrical The Watsons, improv gift-that-keeps-on-giving Austentatious – it’s not enough just to add some songs and call it a day. Which is broadly what Jeffrey Haddow (book and lyrics) and composer Neal Hampton have done here in a show that identifies the interesting tension between a society in which so much must remain unspoken and the heart-on-sleeve outpourings of the traditional musical, and then fails to capitalise on it.
The complicated plot feels like an albatross around the neck of a musical whose dialogue does all the narrative heavy-lifting, while songs feel decorative, incidental: a naughty sea-shanty, a lullaby, a paean to the beauty of nature. Stylistically confused, Hampton’s mixture of opera and musical theatre lands the result squarely in what was once called “light opera” – a sort of generic, Ivor Novello-ish musical sentimentality, without either the courage of its contemporary convictions, or proper period pastiche. Waltzes and tangos do battle in a score that’s attractive without being memorable, its belting demands often too big for a more classically-voiced cast.
Alexandra Cowell is the glue of the show – a deliciously ghastly Mrs Jennings, all stratospheric cackle and bustling energy – but there’s an answering anchor-point of stillness and quiet truth in Rachael Liddell’s Eleanor. Resisting caricature while all around are flinging themselves at it, Liddell supplies some much-needed heart. Elora Rose Ledger camps it up as an (American?) Lucy Steele, her Marianne a hurtle of limbs and emotions, playing off the stoic stillness of John Faal’s Colonel Brandon and Matthew Tilley’s strongly-sung Willoughby.
“I thought that nice was boring, but it’s not!” Marianne declares, swiftly transferring her affections to the stolid Colonel in the final scene. Sense and Sensibility: The Musical suffers from a touch of the Brandons: fatally nice, and just a little bit dull.
To 23 August
