Early Mornings the Musical – Edinburgh Festival Fringe – Paradise in The Vault

Early Mornings the Musical continues at Paradise in The Vault – The Vault, Edinburgh until 24 August 2019.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

This is a fabulously clear and charming show. I was initially tempted to call it both naïve and ingenuous but actually it is neither. Joel Goodman has written a show about writing a show and getting it on at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe but he has at the same time achieved this often daunting task with great clarity and purpose.

The show is performed by one man who is the lead and the writer of the show (Yitzin R Lopez with Goodman as his ‘reluctant’ understudy) and two women (Natalie Davies and Emily Peach) who act as his supporters, his inner voices and play other characters as needed. Peach also choreographs.

For such a small theatre the three of them pack a lot in in terms of staging and simple choreography. What I also know from the daily post show discussion with Goodman is that an awful lot of care and intention went into the recording of the tracks that the performers sing to and that he loves vocal harmony, so a cast of three is the minimum he wants to work with. When music is pre-recorded in a show it is easy to take it for granted, so it was good to hear about the importance of this process. And musically the show works very well indeed.

The piece goes step by step through every stage of the writing and production. In one song the lead’s wife appears and while he is praising her for all her support (‘I love you’) she is at the end of her tolerance for the disturbance his writing is creating in her life (‘I hate you’). We do not find out if their marriage survives.

The show also does not skip over the issue of the huge financial resources that are needed to bring a show to the Fringe and mention is made of casting students as they are cheaper and asking the cast to pay their own expenses. At one point they throw money all over the stage to make the point (and carefully gather it back up again).

Goodman has already written next year’s show and plans to perform in it. I admire his sense of purpose and look forward to seeing how his work develops.

Clare Walters