The Fabulist Fox Sister – Crazy Coqs

Picture: Jane Hobson

The Fabulist Fox Sister was performed at Crazy Coqs, London.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

Spiritualism has often been debunked both by investigative journalism and spiritualists themselves who have confessed to fakery, but it continues to thrive. This need to believe, ‘If They Believe It’, is at the core of The Fabulist Fox Sister, a one-man musical by Michael Conley (book and lyrics) and Luke Bateman (music), directed by Adam Lenson.

In a dark wig drawn back into a bun, Conley narrates the story in the persona of Kate Fox, born in 1837, acknowledging the invisible presence of older sisters Maggie and Leah. A childhood prank led to them explaining weird noises in their house as the ghost of a murdered man with whom they were conversing. Never fully investigated, it was blamed on an innocent man in the town of ‘Hydesville’, with unfortunate consequences. Kate’s ability to crack her toe knuckles loudly (‘Popping My Toes’), creating a sound under her skirts in response to questions at a séance, soon rocketed them to fame and wealth impelled by the urge to escape the stultifying town.

Knowing it’s all fakery, they convince themselves that it’s alright as people have a need to believe (‘If They Believe It’), a catchy jaunty song in the vein of Jerry Herman with tongue-twisting lyrics, which sums up most of the score. The humour in Conley’s script often relies on word play, the other sisters being described as a ‘small medium’ and a ‘happy medium’.

There is also a clever song with a lyric about ‘the fucks I give’! Conley sings with a round baritone that fluidly negotiates some complex lyrics supported by Bateman’s tuneful if unmemorable score, with his top notes trumpeting like Ethel Merman. Their enormous success leads to high-profile fans, hosts of imitators, family squabbles and for Kate a descent into heavy drinking with the two men in her life, Jim Beam and Glen, a malt she discovers on her stay in England.

Sadly the show fails to connect and the format may be where the fault lies. With the feel of a lecture rather than a dramatisation, it’s heavy on narration, and hence feels less involving. Perhaps it works better in a theatre with fuller staging than is possible on the stage at Crazy Coqs.

Conley is well up to the demands of writing a complex song, and performing it; perhaps creating a séance and the characters that might inhabit it, rather like the tea party scene in Jerry Herman’s Dear World? Instead, we get narration with songs interspersed. Emotional engagement doesn’t kick in until halfway through when the characters are revealed as fakes and are on the way down. Various attempts at comebacks are a failure.

The American Civil War and its 600,000 dead provides an upturn, but it isn’t to last. Kate then has her big number justifying the fakery of their lives as offering hope, fulfilling people’s desperate need to contact their departed loved ones. It engages and has the potential to be a real show stopper in the vein of ‘Rose’s Turn’ in Gypsy.

Driven by money and a spurious fame, nearing the end of her time and now in poverty, Kate reflects on her surviving the many ‘crotch kicks’ in her life. And turns on us the audience and accuses us of being complicit in her ruse.

With reworking and the impersonation of the many characters who inhabit this tale, rather than telling us about them, perhaps even an immersive staging, this could be a complex involving work, but as it stands it comes over as an engaging narration with some clever songs to illuminate the telling of it.

Leon Ferguson