Falling in Love with Mr Dellamort – Podcast

Falling in Love with Mr Dellamort (Podcast review)

Star rating: two stars ★ ★ ✩ ✩ ✩

The theremin is a musical instrument like no other. Its tremulous tones, produced by a hand interacting with an electromagnetic field, is the ultimate in “contact free” – and so might be assumed to be apt for the year we’ve just had.

It is also ideally suited to spookiness, and so forms the perfect foundation to the music in a new Gothic musical. Falling in Love with Mr Dellamort was originally devised as a stage musical, but in a pandemic world it has been released instead as a podcast.

Jack Feldstein and Paul Doust’s musical is set on New Year’s Eve at Maison Dellamort, a South Carolina guest house with a mysterious host, the eponymous Mr Dellamort (played by James Monroe Iglehart, who originated the Genie in Aladdin on Broadway and, until lockdown, was playing Lafayette and Jefferson in Hamilton). Every year, a guest falls in love with the host, and if he kisses them at midnight, he captures their soul.

As a concept, it doesn’t make a whole bean of sense, although Iglehart’s introductory song, ‘I’m To Die For’, does do its best to make the scenario sound enticing, if not plausible. But it’s also underlined by the narration by Gavin Lee, which underlines everything in triplicate throughout, removing any hint of nuance.

And that is a problem throughout. In adapting the intending stage version for radio, the narrator seems to be given every single bit of stage direction that isn’t already in dialogue – from going into too much information on set details and telling us when characters have picked up items, to how they move across rooms.

The absolute worst is in Part I, as the three guests arrive, and their characters are described in single sentences more befitting a casting breakdown. Jackie Hoffman’s Mina Thompson is described as “Sixty-ish, and unsuccessfully attempts to hide it. She’s excitable,” while Rhonda Lipson (Lena Hall) is “43, a rough girl with a drug problem” and Telly Leung’s character, Barry Scott, is described in stereotypical terms as a gay fitness addict.

The overall effect is as if one is watching a rehearsed reading with someone reading in the stage directions. And maybe there’s not as much of a tradition with radio drama in the US, but to those of us brought up on BBC radio plays, one needs a little more thought into making a show come alive. Adapting the play so that we learned characters’ motives and behaviours through their dialogue and songs would be so much more enjoyable.

Once the cast is completed – with Courtney Reed gatecrashing proceedings as a mysterious woman by the less-than-mysterious name of Sue Grimshaw – the incessant narration grates less, partly because what passes for action is clearly expressible through song lyrics.

And there are a couple of interesting songs in the mix, although some wear their influences a bit too gaudily to be taken on their own merits. Iglehart excels in his role as he attempts (and, to his surprise, fails) to seduce his guests, but there is more than a hint of Frank N Furter in his delivery – and the inclusion of an “antici… nation” reference can only remind one of the superior musical.

Similarly, when Reed sings of a desire for a suburban life in ‘A Simple Life’, the inclusion of a line about a yearning for “somewhere that’s green” betrays another musical that took the same concept and did it better.

As the story progresses, book writer Feldstein throws a spanner in the works by positing the question about what happens when an angel of death who entraps should by making them fall in love with him, happen to fall in love himself. But as a conceit it’s not really enough to sustain the story over three episodes.

Thankfully the episodes are all fairly short – especially if one skips past the interminable credits after each one, which makes one wonder how many people would need to be involved for a story which was engaging and compulsive.

Perhaps the best that can be said of Falling in Love with Mr Dellamort is that it demonstrates how difficult it is for stage works to be adapted successfully for the audio medium. There are better audio works out there, and they tend to be ones which recognise the capabilities of the format and work with it.

Scott Matthewman