It’s a truism in the theatre, as in life in general, that the higher you aim the further you may have to fall; and so it proved on Wednesday evening when the Menier Chocolate Factory premiered an entirely original musical by veteran Broadway composer/lyricist team David Shire and Richard Maltby Jr, joined by book writer John Weidman, called Take Flight.
In an age of lazy, sometimes hazy jukebox compilation musicals and endless revivals – with the Menier currently represented in the latter corner by the current West End transfer of their last musical, Little Shop of Horrors – it is indeed ambitious to stage an entirely new musical, not to mention one that may be based on pre-existing real lives, but not a pre-existing novel or film. Instead, Maltby, Shire and Weidman have chosen to musicalise an intricate story around some of the early pioneers of flight, from inventors the Wright Brothers to adventurers Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart, who set records for flying alone across the Atlantic.
But while I saw an earlier draft workshop version of this show at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival four years ago where it could be judged on entirely different terms as a work-in-progress and where the Menier’s David Babani first worked on it as well, this theatre – but clearly not this show — have now reached a point where its no longer possible to look at work being presented as purely developmental. By throwing open the doors – and getting the likes of the first string critics of both the London and New York Times to attend, and having the work funded by New York producer Bob Boyett (also in attendance last night, along with his New York publicist Michael Hartman) – it means that both judgement is invited, and a future life anticipated.
Inviting the former too early, however, may stall the latter – and while Maltby and Shire famously wrote one of the seminal jukebox compilations of my life when they brought some of the songs they had written together into the revue Starting Here, Starting Now (the title song of which was sung, coincidentally, by Barbra Streisand as the opening number of her current tour), I feel I may have to adapt that title myself: Starting Here, Ending Now.
What might pass muster in a festival of new musicals crash-lands in such an exposed place. The Menier is, in this case, a victim of its own success; we come to it now expecting a fully-formed work, and it is presented as such, not as an experimental try-out. Similarly, the transfer of Martin Wagner’s The Agent to the Trafalgar Studios last night – after a run in March at Islington’s Old Red Lion, with one of the two actors now changed – moves it to another level of scrutiny that this particular work can’t live up to. It’s a bright but slight play, and unlike the transfer of Elling — another fringe hit from the Bush to the main studio space upstairs – it feels cumbersome and overloaded now with expectation.
