Evangeline – The Glitch

Evangeline was reviewed at The Glitch, London.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

What happened to musical theatre stars that made them the success they are? And what will happen after they leave the spotlight, or the spotlight leaves them?

Such questions have been explored many times before, and will doubtless continue to inspire many a show. They certainly inspire Evangeline, a musical by Nia Williams (who also plays keys) that tells the story of one such character.

Guy Brigg plays Evangeline, recounting her story from her early days as the offspring of an addict mother who would sell her baby for adoption to wealthy couples, then rob their house and steal the child back to repeat the scam. One of her mother’s only acts of kindness, Brigg recounts, is to leave baby Evie in a cardboard box outside a health centre, where she is found by the teacher of a children’s ballet school.

Under the tutelage of her new adoptive mother, Madame Dorabella – who, despite projecting the air of a Russian ballet mistress, is actually a former actress from Bolton – Evie gradually gets introduced into the world of the performing arts. Throughout, Williams’ songs recall some typical stylings of Broadway and West End musicals. Brigg performs the numbers with more confidence and zeal than he does the main story, which otherwise limps along predictably.

That’s the biggest issue with Evangeline as a musical. As a story that races through a performer’s life, events shoot by, sometimes accompanied by a short song but not staying long enough to really register. There’s also precious little in Evangeline’s story that really stands out. Even the tale of her big West End break, propelled to the lead role after the lead and all alternates suffer coincidental accidents, feels like a knock-off of other stories (the show itself is 47th Street, a not-so-obvious nod to the musical set five streets lower in which exactly the same thing happens).

Evangeline’s relationship with Fabian, that show’s director, forms the production’s strongest strand. That said, it starts off with Fabian’s declaration of love, in ‘I Start Again With You’, that feels emptier than it should because up to then there is no character to the director, other than his name.

With some writing attention and more of a focus to this period of Evangeline’s life, the musical would be all the stronger. For there are elements of the relationship – which becomes coercive and, ultimately, violent – that deliver the sort of emotional connection with Brigg’s character that is otherwise missing.

That storyline culminates when Evangeline – now older if not wiser, and used to applying pancake to cover up bruises – is starring in a thinly-veiled version of Carousel, a musical which has its own troubled relationship with domestic abuse. There is an arc to this portion of Evangeline’s life that feels more complete than the extended life story Williams and Brigg deliver.

Still, we do get a look at the aftermath, as Evangeline first succumbs to alcoholism and then, after rehab and a change of career, becomes the singing teacher she was when the character was first introduced in Williams’ musical Melody. Unless one knows that musical also, it’s a conclusion to a prequel tale that feels less than satisfying.

Like so many of us, Evangeline has several interesting and challenging parts of her story, but many elements of her biography feel as if they are nothing special. In the hour allotted, Evangeline the musical would feel much stronger with some editorial judgement that could focus the storytelling and performance more solidly.

Scott Matthewman