Broken Romantics: A Unicorn’s Quest for Love continues at Greenside until 18 August 2o18 (also 20-25).
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
Emma Dean is a F&@cking Unicorn, and don’t you forget it.
Heartbreak has been the muse of many an artist since the dawn of time, but Dean manages to infuse some bizarre and bittersweet life into the genre with a song-cycle of cleverly original, theatrical-pop songs, sprinkled with some well chosen cover arrangements.
Joined by her band, “The Broken Romantics”, and dancer/choreographer Jamie Kendall, Dean invites us in to share her journey of romance, self-discovery, and finding comfort in your own skin, however weird you think others might find it.
And, let’s not lie, it gets weird. Real weird. Joyfully weird. Ecstatically weird.
Kendall delivers a passionate and committed visual to the tales, imbuing his own contemporary choreography to Dean’s songs with delicacy, visceral feeling, and a good helping of fun.
Dean’s electric vocals are of course, remarkable, but also fantastically unpredictable. It’s a treat to hear her play with the form with such freedom, and a relief when she doesn’t over use her vocal acrobatics either, relying on the honesty of her delivery when she chooses to.
The songs do once or twice drift into similar patterns – sometimes the specifics of the individual heartbreaks get a little abstracted amongst the lyric, but it’s the beauty of Dean’s arrangements, and the subtle touch of her band, that carry us through these momentary lulls.
For a show which can turn, at the flick of a switch, from soul-baring melancholy to brazen confessional surrealism, the delivery of links between numbers can feel a little upright and polished. In these moments, there’s a certain distance kept between Dean herself and the audience which denies us the intimacy the songs deliver throughout.
Nevertheless, it’s easy to forget what it takes to stand onstage and declare, with your own voice, that what you have to say is important, funny, worthy of attention – and for a show that wants to pick away at our learned cynicism, it’s even more of a vulnerable task.
Make no mistake though – Dean’s unicorn-ego is no wilting cupcake, it’s forged in the fire of heartbreak, and bathed in the fury of her own awakening. This is a glittering, rainbow-hued warrior of a unicorn, and we are lucky to be in her presence.
Aura Simon
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