David Perkins, Harry F Brown, Julie Atherton, Emma Whittaker and Georgina Hellier in The Green Fairy at the Union Theatre, London. Picture: Jack Sain
The Green Fairy continues at the Union Theatre, London until 23 November 2019.
Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩
This new musical, The Green Fairy, is the result of a workshop at the King’s Head in Islington where new writers Jack Sain and Stephen Libby, a vocal double-act, have exercised their writing muscles to produce an immersive production set in a London bar.
Following its workshop it was given encouragement by the theatre industry, so they developed it into a full-length show based on their own life experiences and what they wanted to say. They have dubbed it “a queer pub musical” in “a story about Londoners, about growing up and about getting on. The show has evolved and grown, genders have changed, themes have twisted, songs and scenes have been thrown out [and] new ones created”.
The subject of the show is Jo, a woman of indeterminate age, who washes up at the London pub where she used to work. She arrives in time to see her daughter Wendy make her musical debut at the pub, singing and playing guitar.
Some time ago Jo had abandoned her ex-husband, her daughter and her former girlfriend. She appears to be living out of a bottle but turns up to see if she can find out what happened to her life and her loves. As if by magic and on cue the Green Fairy appears in order, it seems, to provide some answers.
The revelations are accompanied by appropriate songs to illustrate various situations – ‘End of the Day’, ‘The Girl in Green’, ‘All Eyes on You’, ‘Follow the Sea’, ‘By Your Side’ and ‘Happy Hour’ etc which go some way towards explaining Jo’s unhappy predicament.
Should she have married her husband rather than sustaining the relationship with her girlfriend and, if she was a queer parent, why didn’t she make a better job of it? The Green Fairy, who is a sort of genie figure or a fairy godmother with a psychoanalytical conscience for Jo, endeavours to understand why Jo feels so unloved.
Act II offers some answers. The girlfriend, a Hollywood actress, returns to London from the US to announce that she still loves Jo. There are songs illustrating both ‘Hollywood’ and ‘Londontown’ along with numbers for the husband, her employer and her daughter. However, there is a certain sameness about many of the songs which also seem a tad derivative.
That said, however, the performers have obvious talents both vocally and instrumentally because most of the cast accompany themselves on guitar or cello.
Musical director William Bullivant at the piano keeps the singers and the songs on the level, although I felt they also needed a drummer because all the banging of hands on tables I found was too much of a distraction.
The small cast of six acquit themselves well, with Julie Atherton being all too believable as sad case Jo. Emma Kinney, in her first professional stage role, as daughter Wendy is vocally strong, while Emma Whittaker as young Jo, and David Perkins and Harry F Brown as the men in Jo’s life offer good support. Georgina Hellier as both Jo’s ex-girlfriend and the eponymous Green Fairy turns in a charming double-act. And Katharine Heath’s pub setting is just as atmospheric as the Union Theatre’s own bar.
It’s a well-known fact that the staging of any new musical is notoriously difficult to get right first time around. Cole Porter could do it, and so could Irving Berlin. Rodgers and Hammerstein did it in spades and only fell down when they tried something new and different like Allegro. Stephen Sondheim had many good times creating his musicals, that is when he wasn’t suffering from the bad times.
With The Green Fairy I am not so sure that Sain and Libby have yet reached a state of total success with their first show together. Both contribute lyrics but Sain is also the composer, the book writer and the director, so perhaps he just is too close to the material to make it work satisfactorily – for me, anyway.
Still, judging by the whoops and hollers on the first night, the friends of the cast really loved it. No doubt Sain and Libby have more ideas up their sleeves, so keep watching this space for further developments.
Michael Darvell
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