Violet – Charing Cross Theatre

Kaisa Hammarlund in Violet at the Charing Cross Theatre, London. Picture: Scott Rylander

Violet continues at the Charing Cross Theatre, London until 6 April 2019.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

It may be overshadowed in composer Jeanine Tesori’s back catalogue by Fun Home and Shrek the Musical, but the musical score for Violet is one of her best.

Brian Crawley’s book doesn’t quite live up to the music, its origins as a short story all too obvious with a narrative that at times verges on the perfunctory. Kaisa Hammarlund’s Violet travels on a Greyhound bus from her small town in North Carolina to Tulsa, Oklahoma, hoping that a televangelist will cure her of the facial scar she incurred in a childhood accident.

What Crawley does acknowledge is that this is the sort of story that not only teaches that real beauty is within, but the real wounds are those which leave no outward scar, and can remain open for decades. Kammarlund brings out several sides to Violet’s character effectively, a damaged young woman who is as much defiant and petulant as she is vulnerable and naïve.

Violet’s journey through a Deep South that is still struggling to come to terms with the Civil Rights Act and desegregation is tinged with racial overtones, particularly as she gains friendship with two soldiers on her bus, Jay Marsh’s Flick and Matthew Harvey’s Monty.

Marsh is particularly strong as the black man who has ascended to sergeant – the highest role he can aspire to, lacking the college background that could make him officer material. In contrast, Harvey is called upon to be the obnoxious, leering white man at the start of the play, until a sudden character shift after Violet accepts his hitherto unwanted sexual advances. It is this about-face in the character’s personality that is the least effective, and most troubling, aspect of Crawley’s book.

Where the musical succeeds most is the music. As Violet’s journey progresses from state to state, Tesori plays with the various strands of American blues, from the banjo-led strains of rural folk music to the brassy strains of Memphis rhythm and blues and the soaring vocals of a gospel choir.

Director Shuntaro Fujita, who directs this production as the first in a series of co-productions with Osaka’s Umeda Arts Theater, helps bring out Violet’s internal struggles with a series of flashbacks and dream sequences in which Violet recalls her isolated childhood with her single parent father (Keiron Crook) and her fears over the real reason for her disfigurement. Several of these scenes overlap the main narrative, relying on Howard Hudson’s subtle lighting cues to provide a suggestion of the difference between times.

Generally such an approach works well, although it would work better if the sound design did not drown out many of the vocals in favour of the piped-in offstage nine-piece band. Part of the problems in sound design may be down to the Charing Cross Theatre’s drastic reconfiguration, designer Morgan Large moving the stage to the middle of the auditorium to create a traverse seating arrangement around a large circular revolve. It is such a significant departure from the theatre’s traditional space that it is perhaps unsurprising that sound balances are a little off.

One hopes any such niggles are overcome swiftly, for the theatre’s new space is this production’s biggest asset. The theatre’s long, narrow auditorium has been a curse for many a production, ensuring half the audience feel both figuratively and literally distant from the stage. Suddenly, with the new configuration, the Charing Cross Theatre becomes an intimate space for perhaps the first time in its history. At a stroke it has become the sort of space that certainly has the potential to be the home for adventurous musical theatre that artistic director Thom Southerland has always wanted it to be.

Scott Matthewman