NIGHTFLIGHTS. To 17 July.

Dundee

NIGHTFLIGHTS
by Marcella Evaristi, music by Hilary Brooks

Dundee Rep 15-17 July 2002
7.45pm
Runs 3hr 5min One interval

TICKETS 01382 223530
Review Timothy Ramsden 22 June

Ambitious new musical ends up mostly confusing.Of four full-length shows in this summer's Dundee repertory season, three are musicals. And of the three, this is the most ambitious. It sets out to do what few not named Stephen Sondheim have managed lately, to explore internal human pressures through a song-soaked narrative.

It works in opera. And Evaristi's concept is familiar enough in European drama. The idea of relationships, and the internal demons which disrupt them, being resolved through liberation from daily social expectations in a story which takes place under moonlight, with its licensed lunacies, is common enough: a forest in A Midsummer Night's Dream, a garden in The Marriage of Figaro, carnival time in Masquerade: three plays that all became operas.

The last two remain best known in musical form, so a song-play built around a collection of people whose lives are re-arranged during carnival-time has hopeful precedents. Yet it takes a lot of experience, and almost as much reworking, for anyone to create a suitable mix of song and speech, playing off and enhancing each other, driving the narrative and exposing the characters in tandem.

And it's the lack of these qualities that keeps Nightflights grounded. Soul-on-sleeve songs merely create pauses in action. As songs so often do. But here, when the action starts moving again, the ground has shifted no father forward. Indeed, given what seems a rough assemblage of its elements of agoraphobia, impotence, love and loss, it sometimes seems (on first viewing anyway) that three or four separate vehicles are slinging around the tracks, albeit painted superficially with the same livery.

Nor does Dundee's Rep company, for all their strengths, have the musical qualities to hack it in such a serious piece. What's adequate enough for Forbes Masson's amusing ditties is severely stretched here. That's not, primarily, a matter of singing techniques – where a lot of shortcomings can be covered between body-mike and speaker.

But the songs seem isolated from the rest of the characters' stage lives. Mixing reality and fairy-tale fantasy needs more skill and stirring; at present the resulting concoction is all lumps and no lightness of texture.

Pulcinella/Lucio: Andrew Clark
Sebastiano: Keith Fleming
Virginia/Woman: Meg Fraser
Bianca: Susan Harrison
George/Man in Moon: Peter Kelly
Isabella: Irene Macdougall
Lorenzo: Billy Mack
Massimo: Rodney Matthew
Calma/Cardinal: Sandy Neilson
Guido: Robert Paterson
Rosa/Martha: Ann Louise Ross
Raffaella/Chicken: Frances Thorburn
Bruno: Alexander West
Maddalena: Emily Weinter
Benadetta: Rosie Duncan
Italiajn Story-reader: Pino Lapadula

Director: Hamish Glen
Designer: Geoff Rose
Lighting: Richard Moffatt
Musical Director: Hilary Brooks
Choreographer: Kenn Oldfield

2002-07-14 13:17:59