Picture: Mark Senior
Silence! The Musical was reviewed at the Assembly Checkpoint, Edinburgh. The show will also play at the Turbine Theatre, London from 4-28 September 2024.
Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩
It doesn’t take long to tune into the tone of this late-night unauthorised parody of the Academy Award-winning film The Silence of the Lambs starring Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins. It opens with a chorus of actual lambs (well, hardworking ensemble members dressed as lambs) and not long after there’s a musical number entitled ‘If I Could Smell Her C**t’, complete with a dream ballet featuring FBI agent Clarice Starling (legs akimbo) held aloft by Dr Hannibal Lecter.
The press blurb for Silence! The Musical suggests the show is presented in gleefully bad taste and it is not wrong. What’s clever about the writing (John and Al Kaplan, Hunter Bell) though is it appears to take the storytelling very seriously, presenting the tense negotiations between Starling and notorious serial killer Lecter, and yet has something of a Play That Goes Wrong approach to the production values – with show tunes thrown in.
Director-choreographer Christopher Gattelli and designer Scott Pask have great fun with these elements, throwing in references to other musicals (Chicago, Newsies) and scenes featuring the jazz interpretation of an autopsy and a tactical tango navigated around a bulletproof screen. Some of the inventive design decisions in this low-budget Fringe context have the booze-fuelled audience in stitches too – the scenes when Clarice’s father arrives to give her advice from beyond the grave are particularly memorable.
All the members of the 10-strong ensemble work their socks off, never letting up the pace as the crazy antics switch from singing serial killers to FBI officers demonstrating their best Busby Berkeley-style moves.
Both the leads are perfectly cast and manage to somehow keep control of the plot despite the bonkers chaos that surrounds them. Mark Oxtoby is suitably creepy as Lecter, relishing the chance to be camp and outrageous, even ad-libbing on occasions. Boasting a deliberately dodgy wig and exaggerated Southern accent, Phoebe Panaretos ticks all the right boxes as Clarice, and her vocals aren’t too shabby either.
After a while, the humour of the piece grew a little thin for me, despite the best efforts of a great group of performers and creatives, but for fans of the original movie in particular Silence! The Musical serves up all the right ingredients – although it’s probably best to avoid the ‘liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti’.
Lisa Martland
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