In Pieces is available on stream.theatre until 26 April 2021.
Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩
What a year it’s been, and what different approaches musical theatre makers have taken to get content out there. We started off with hastily assembled performances from living rooms, and progressed to a few theatres letting in small groups of actors and singers to perform on stage while the audience remained at home.
Director Louis Rayneau’s musical film of In Pieces, a song cycle by American composer Joey Contreras, feels like a presentation that is uniquely possible in such times. Recorded on location, the piece is mostly shot in KidZania, a job-based theme park for children which has lain empty and unused during the pandemic. The environment, which in normal times sees children role-play various adult jobs, presents an ersatz town square whose child-sized proportions seem ever so slightly off.
The effect is to create a hyper-realistic, if oddly proportioned, wraparound set in which the camera is free to move anywhere and everywhere. This allows Rachel Sargent’s choreography – which ranges from the playful ebullience of ‘Love Wildly’ to more contemplative pieces where ensemble members perform emotive pas de deux – to go anywhere, and contributes to a sense of world-building that really benefits the piece.
And as for the piece, all Contreras’ songs are united on the theme of love. Which, when you think about it, is pretty much the case for nearly every musical theatre piece going, so thematically the visuals become more important to create a sense of cohesion that the song choices can lack.
Many of Contreras’ pieces feel familiar, perhaps because they tread a musical path that is already well trodden. A song entitled ‘Another New York Love Story’ might be a knowing nod to such an established trope as a plaintive soprano backed by piano and cello; instead, it’s played deadly seriously, and contributes nothing to the genre.
Many of Contreras’ other numbers suffer similarly from such a sense of déjà vu. But occasionally, when stepping away from musical theatre tradition and heading more towards pop, some gems emerge. Chief among these is ‘Like You Don’t Miss Me’, a chart-worthy slice of bubblegum that one could imagine Radios 1 and 2 both going nuts for. It’s performed with such a sense of fun by Amy Di Bartolomeo, Hiba Elchikhe and Danielle Steers that when the whole film is over, that’s the number that sticks in the memory.
Less happily, something that also sticks out is the quality of lip-syncing [Producer Future Spotlight has told Musical Theatre Review that all the artists are singing live in the recording and not miming. Scott is writing in the context that, to him, it always looked and sounded like the performances were lip-synced]. Musical director Edward Court has worked with the performers to create exemplary studio recordings of each number – some, I’d venture to say, better than those that appear on the In Pieces highlights CD from its American debut. But the on-set singing along to these tracks is of a highly variable quality. It’s disconcerting when a performer can be heard belting out with gusto, but on screen they seem to be whispering.
It’s an effect which is most pronounced in the opening number, which unfortunately means it’s a phenomenon that one can’t help but notice throughout. Perhaps the biggest casualty is Steers’ beautiful ‘With Him’, sensitively shot on a black box stage with few other distractions. The emotion of the ballad is negated somewhat by Steers having to directly emulate her prerecorded track; one desperately wants to hear her imbue the song with nuance and off-the-cuff emotion, and the lip-syncing denies her that chance.
Beyond that, some characters are clearly meant to have ongoing storylines, although you’d struggle to pick up on that through the piece. The end credits, where each lead performer is revealed to have a character name that’s never referenced in the work itself, is the biggest clue. Perhaps the most coherent of these is Ross Harmon’s on-off relationship with Jordan Luke Gage, which runs the gamut from the joyful flush of first love, to having one’s head turned while a partner is away, to the anguish of betrayal.
Contreras’ cycle ends with the titular ‘In Pieces’, in which the company (led by Kyle Birch, who excels through) exhort that their lives deserve to be filled continuously with love, rather than fragmented, and ‘Fork in the Road’, in which Gage and company celebrate the journey rather than worrying too much about each decision taken along the way.
For all its faults up until then, In Pieces goes out with a cracking finale. And that leaves one thinking slightly higher of a piece which has at least gone out of its way to present something in an unusual, distinctive manner at a time when the normality we all crave for is just out of reach.
Scott Matthewman
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