Tick,
Tick...BOOM! was murdered by bad tech. That's the one explanation
I can find for how a lauded musical with such a professional cast could
have sounded so horribly amateur on its second night.
I'd been looking forward to this show for two main reasons. First of
all, I adored the sheer energy and taboo of Jonathan Larson's Rent back
in the 90s, a rock musical made all the more precious by the fact that
the young composer had died a day before the final dress rehearsal.
Tick, Tick...BOOM! was one of Larson's earlier musicals, an
intensely autobiographical work that never made it to Broadway in his
lifetime. I'd known it couldn't be as amazing as Rent, but
I'd heard good things about the quality of its songs and its different
thematic focus.
Second, I was thrilled that after years of watching cloned Broadway
productions by touring drama companies, we were finally in for a show
put on by a more or less genuinely New York cast. Jerry Dixon was an
alumnus of the original Broadway run, while Christian Campbell and Nicole
Snelson were part of the original team that toured American cities,
with Campbell also chosen to play the lead role during the show's premiere
season in the West End. I mean, Jiminy Cricket - it felt like we were
being treated like a real international city of the arts, thanks to
Fiction Farm director Ng Chin Han's personal connections with the cast.
But ultimately, neither my hope for a solid musical nor my sincere
expectation of a solid performance was satisfied. Tick, Tick...
BOOM! isn't quite "Rent with worse songs", as
the much-maligned ST reporter Hong Xinyi called it, but it
does cover much the same ground, zooming in specifically on the individual
crisis of being tempted as an artist to sell out your dream for a corporate
job. Specifically, the protagonist John is concerned about the prospect
of having outlived expectations of being a "promising young composer"
as he counts down the days of the week to his 30th birthday. And while
I, being part of a traditionally younger black-box indie audience, was
able to empathise immensely with this, I noticed that the whole affair
didn't quite resonate with the cufflink crowd who tend to turn up for
an HSBC-sponsored musical.
As an autobiographical piece, the show wavers between touching honesty
and self-indulgence. Quiet, contemplative songs tended to work extremely
well - Johnny Can't Decide and Why were powerful,
evocative explorations of emotional crises, allowing the voices of the
small cast to take over the large proscenium stage. But a few other
songs were just noisy and puzzlingly irrelevant - Green Green Dress
and Sugar were rock odes to favourite objects with little justification
for their presence.
The motivation for these songs, however, was of little consequence
compared to their horrendously unprofessional delivery. 30/90,
the opening song, was replete with clever banter and jaunty metaphors
- none of which the audience was able to hear. The over-amplified band
music simply drowned out the actors' voices, so that we lost both melody
and lyrics. This happened in the case of every loud rock number - eight
out of the fourteen songs, to be exact - and by the third time it happened,
one just stopped trying to eke out any wit from the dumb-show happening
onstage.
As if this wasn't enough, several pieces suffered sound distortion.
The most painful example of this occurred when Snelson delivered what
was intended to be the climactic diva-song of the evening - Come
to Your Senses. Every time she crescendoed, her voice came out
grotesquely warped and harsh - and she somehow could not tell that her
voice was being thus abused. Had she gone deaf, or was the sound system
rigged so badly that she was unable to hear herself sing? I really don't
know - I'm hoping it was merely a temporary tech issue they'd fixed
by the weekend. Otherwise, people paid good money to spend Saturday
night buggering their ears.
It sounds like I'm rejecting the possibility that the musical problems
were the fault of the actors, like I believe that this foreign talent
was incapable of sin. I'm not absolving them of fault - at junctures,
I really didn't believe they were putting in the energy that their characters
deserved. Dixon, serving in double capacity as director and actor, also
seemed to have made some poor stagecraft decisions, failing to truly
animate the large theatre with the cast of three, and also throwing
in a pointless local reference to "bakuteh and kaya toast"
into a New York deli scene.
Nonetheless, I find it difficult to accept that such an established
group of professional musical performers could have ruined the musical
dimension of the play so immensely. I am literally unable to give a
considered appraisal of the rock components of the musical score itself
because I spent those portions of the performance wincing. Which brings
me to the moment of profound embarrassment: was Singapore to blame for
organising this event so badly that we could make even A-list Broadway
singers sound bad? Are we that much of a trash-hole?
Otherwise, it was a good thing that Larson's libretto was there to
save the day, whenever it was audible. The play was packed with killer
one-liners, evoking that good old smart-aleck voice that made Rent
so edgy. As a straight play, where actors had to play multiple personalities
and mime the entirety of Manhattan with meagre props onstage, this worked.
I'm not out to malign techies, who are a valuable and under-appreciated
pool of people who're never thanked when stuff goes right. So like a
kindergarten teacher, I'm going to draw a universal moral out of this
- we can't depend on the prior fame of our imports when we're investing
in a show; not in the reputation of the author of the play nor in the
high standards of the performers involved. Some other, less well-attended
part of the dramatic process at home can reach in and wreck the production.
So let's not put our trust in Broadway - they're only half the picture.
We'll also have to depend on ourselves.
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"I'm hoping they'd fixed the tech issues by the weekend shows.
Otherwise, people paid good money to spend Saturday night buggering
their ears"
Credits
Book, Music, Lyrics: Jonathon Larson
Director: Jerry Dixon
Musical Director: Edward G. Robinson
Stage Manager: Matthew G. Marholin
Lighting Designer: Gregory Bloxham
Script Consultant: David Auburn
Producer: Ng Chin Han
Cast: Christian Campbell, Jerry Dixon and Nicole Snelson
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