Emma Hunton and Krystina Alabado in The Mad Ones at 59E59 Theaters, New York. Picture: Richard Termine
The Mad Ones continues at 59E59 Theaters, New York until 17 December.
Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩
Sing as loud as you can and then sing even louder. That seems to be the mantra for a lot of new musicals, and it’s followed scrupulously in The Mad Ones, creating too many ear-splitting moments in this Off-Broadway musical that’s already busy telling an overwrought story of teenage angst and search for identity.
These larynx-tearing vocals – which admittedly have their enthusiastic fans – also tend to detract from some otherwise appealing melody lines and expressive lyric writing in this piece by a pair of brightly emerging musical theatre creators, Kait Kerrigan and Brian Lowdermilk.
The two are responsible for the show’s book, lyrics and music, as well as the frequently impressive orchestrations for piano, guitar, harp and violin. Paul Staroba is the music director.
The show is a production of the Prospect Theater Company, a 19-year-old operation dedicated to fostering new voices in musical theatre, claiming more than 30 New York musical premiere productions to its credit.
The Mad One’s central figure is Samantha, known as Sam, a young woman who has just graduated high school, and when we meet her she’s sitting in a car feverishly attempting to sort out her future. Sam’s a smart girl, valedictorian of her class, but as she sings about herself, “only you know how uncertain you are”.
Sam, we learn, is being torn apart by two opposing forces, her overbearing, feminist mother Beverly, and the ghost – or memory – of her overbearing best gal pal, Kelly, recently killed by an oncoming auto.
Beverly aims for a trophy child who will study at prestigious Harvard University; Kelly pushes Sam toward a more carefree and wild time at a state college. Inspired by Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road, Kelly dreams of just hitting the highway.
Also in the mix are Sam’s raging hormones, which until just recently have been ignored by her heart-throbby but reticent boyfriend Adam, sublimating his sex drive by eating lots of tacos and such.
The book and songs wander in and out of episodes in both Sam’s recent past and her imagination: crazy road trips she could have taken with Kelly and the momentous day when she passes her driver’s licence test after several failures. And at long last she reaches an upbeat conclusion that I’m not sure is truly earned.
Along with Kelly and Beverly, Sam sings: “You look back one more time,” and then, something like the heroine in a wildly popular animated film and forthcoming Broadway musical, she sings solo: “Then you let it go.” And the closing number ends with lots of repetition of the word “freedom”.
Against an abstract set marked by splotches of colour and light (designed by Adam Rigg and lit by David Lander), Stephen Brackett’s direction and Alexandra Beller’s choreography keep the proceedings moving fluidly if not always clearly as to what’s happening, as one incident or daydream blurs into another.
The show’s four performers, however, bring distinctive personalities to their roles, along with heroic vocalising and those necessary vocal cords of steel.
Krystina Alabado is appropriately fretful as Sam, looking concerned even when she brightens up with a smile. Kelly’s free-spirit playfulness, as limned by Emma Hunton, is admirably energised if almost relentlessly so, while Leah Hocking’s Beverly moves tellingly from stereotypic monster mother to frustrated mum baking cookies nobody eats and stalwart feminist aware of how far women have come but how far they still have to go for parity in a man’s world. She elaborates on the last point in a compelling anthem, ‘Miles to Go’.
Impressively taking on the role of Adam at the performance reviewed was Jay Armstrong Johnson, a replacement for the originally cast Ben Fankhauser, out on vocal rest until 5 December. Ironically, Adam has what is probably the show’s most engaging song, ‘Run Away with Me.”
“Let me be your ride out of town/Let me be the place that you hide,” he sings to the unmoored Sam. And Johnson renders it with great heart, with just a minimum of those decibel-shattering notes.
The number demonstrates that with some musical restraint and script clarification The Mad Ones might be a show that could well stab at your heart instead of pounding a lot at your eardrums.
Ron Cohen
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