Moment by Moment, the movie adaptation of a song cycle by Alexander Sage Oyen.
Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩
The term ‘song cycle’ is an occasionally overused one. A programme of seemingly unconnected musical theatre numbers by the same composer, each with their own self-contained story, could sometimes be more accurately thought of as a revue – a great example being Don Black’s From the Heart, recently concluded at the Garrick Theatre.
A true song cycle often carries a strong through line, allowing thematic elements to create cohesion between the disparate songs rather than any true narrative. Even then, the line is blurry, especially when the narrative line can be summed up as ‘love’. Maltby and Shire’s Closer Than Ever fits into this grey area. So, too, does Alexander Sage Oyen’s Moment by Moment.
Debuting as a concert at New York’s 54 Below in 2013, Oyen’s work focuses on the love lives of a handful of twentysomething Manhattanites. A new film version, directed by Louis Rayneau, unites a cast including Cleve September and Cassidy Janson with Oyen’s poppy, emotion-flecked numbers.
Shot predominantly in black and white – a colour scheme associated with New York ever since Woody Allen’s Manhattan – Rayneau’s direction gives a moodiness to proceedings, as well as being able to soften the line between originally shot material and stock footage. The majority of the numbers are performed indoors, with exposed brickwork or large fronded pot plants in front of chic panelled walls suggesting Manhattan loft living at its most cinematic.
After an opening number, ‘Live Forever’, featuring the whole ensemble, the song cycle settles into its default mode of solo storytelling with Ross Harmon singing ‘Painting Now’, ostensibly about a young man contemplating whether life as a struggling artist fits in with what the younger version of himself wanted to be. Some spirited ensemble dancing, along with some neat camerawork that enables Harmon to regularly swap places with a young dancer playing his boyhood self, promises much for the rest of the work.
The music is fun if not especially catchy. Oyen’s style of songwriting definitely falls into the same mould as many a contemporary musical theatre songwriter who might cite Jason Robert Brown or Scott Alan as inspirations. They’re bright, occasionally deep and rarely without some levels of humour.
There are elements of ambiguity, too; Katie Tonkinson’s ‘Incense’ recalls a past relationship through sense memory, but with a hint that the memories may not be good ones. When her character reemerges a few songs later with ‘In His Eyes’, what she has gone through becomes more explicit, the song’s Kate Bush-like lyrical stylings are accompanied by horror film visions of a masked man pursuing her. It’s one of the film’s more disturbing turns but not its most visually incongruous.
That falls to the group number ‘Girls’ Night Out’ in which Lois Morgan Gay, May Tether, Jarneia Richard-Noel and Collette Guitart enjoy a night out together. Unfortunately, while scenes within a bathroom imply a high-end club’s restroom facilities, the disco floor looks to all intents and purposes like a suburban London front room. It’s a weird choice that makes the whole song feel like it’s overpromising and underdelivering.
Other numbers fare better. Chloe Saracco and Cleve September’s duet, ‘You Just Like to Give Me Shit’, in which a couple celebrate how much they enjoy winding each other up, is fun, although it falls prey to the same saccharine that affects many of Oyen’s love songs. Cassidy Janson gets two affecting solo performances, as well as providing supporting work within some of the others.
Perhaps the most annoying number of them all is ‘Bro Duet’, in which Harmon and Jordan Donnelly play two men who are admitting they have fallen in love with one another while trying not to be too gay about it. There may be a world in which the choral repetition of “No Homo” is light, playful and amusing – but here it just feels forced.
Less forced, but no less inexplicable, is the film’s occasional move from back and white into colour. Such moments are brief, which should make them powerful. Instead, they seem inexpertly utilised. When the whole piece is deliberately monochromatic, one yearns for the splashes of Technicolor to bring some form of subtext to life. Instead, they feel more like visual flourishes that are, at best, superfluous, and sometimes distracting from a song’s narrative elements.
Even then, though, there is a lot to enjoy about Moment by Moment. But while its video form is enjoyable in its own right, it feels as if the stage would be the best place to experience the tales that Alexander Sage Oyen is keen to tell.
Scott Matthewman
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