Americana: A Murder Ballad continues at Assembly Checkpoint, Edinburgh until 17 August 2022.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
It seems like every few weeks there is a mass shooting in the US, often in high schools. This is followed by an out pouring of grief, candlelit vigils, flower strewn memorials followed by political posturing, proposals to tinker with the gun laws, push back from the powerful gun lobby and then nothing changes. For most of us not in the USA (and many there too), we just don’t understand the culture, symbolism and mythology of the gun and the inability to deal with the tragedy.
Morna Young and Davey Anderson have created a thoughtful and impressive musical story telling the tale of one fictional high school shooting and the young people involved. The murder ballad as a genre was exported to America from other countries, notably from Lowland Scots, so it is somewhat appropriate that the form is used in this Pepperdine Scotland collaboration. Anderson’s folk and country and western inspired music is impressive and skilfully delivered by the cast of actor-musicians, the sometimes jaunty tunes at odds with the horrors unfolding on stage.
The Balladeer orchestrates the action like a weird puppeteer pulling the strings of the characters, whose stories are acted out before us until they begin to question what they are doing and turn on the author puppet master.
An exceptionally talented young committed ensemble vividly and movingly bring the stories alive, at first as an assigned number then as a character based on a real-life story.
Although always gripping the show could perhaps do with a little trimming but director Cathy Thomas-Grant and choreographer Haley Powell have created a simple, effective and powerful staging of a musical that asks many questions but doesn’t provide the answers (who can?).
Keith Paterson
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