Picture: Royal Conservatoire of Scotland/Robert McFadzean
City of Dreams continues at the Gilded Balloon Patter House, Edinburgh until 23 August 2019.
Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
This is one of three musical theatre pieces by Finn Anderson at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. Two in the main programme, this and Islander (Summerhall) and one which will start being written with young people from British Youth Music Theatre in a workshop throughout week one.
He is a voice and creative centre who will continue to gain a profile across his homeland of Scotland, throughout the UK musical theatre industry and internationally. This is the second work he and Portuguese/UK theatre director/bookwriter Tania Azevedo have created for the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland with the Northwestern University American Musical Theatre Project – a blended cast of masters from Chicago and Glasgow courses exploring new work and new ideas to stretch their creative skills and allow new musical theatre writers the space to create exciting work.
City of Dreams is rightly described as a “modern myth for our times”, bringing to our attention the need to retain the gifts of imagination inherent in our “child” and slowly managed out of us, if we are not careful, by the parent/machine of state and our own adult learning.
Within this joyful celebration are deep philosophical explorations: “To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination” (Einstein) challenging us to refind our child and go just beyond the old questions and the old answers. Finn/Azevedo’s balance between speech and song, sound scape and “number”, pop and folk, enrich and illuminate their newly created myth.
I suspect the piece needs more time, more space, a slightly bigger canvas, and the reflections by the writers which is the luxury of seeing the show at the Fringe and creating it in this RCS/NWU cauldron. The company takes this new myth and storytelling magic and creates rounded characters delivered with real belief and pathos.
The message is strong, and full front at the end, and so it should be – the future of our world, as in this mythic creation, is in the hands of the children who have to teach the adults how to live and shine. I suspect this will become a show chosen by schools and companies all over the world when it is published. In the meantime get down to Chambers Street and see the original and check out the other half of the Limbo project (Twelve) too.
Chris Grady
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