Wait For Me Live is accessible though a link on the WaitForMeLive Facebook page.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
This is a sweet show. It’s billed as a major new dance musical which is an interesting concept. Four dancers tell the story and there are singers who sometimes sing their inner monologues and articulate their feelings in words. It works well, partly because it is beautifully and elegantly synchronised, the dance is beautiful, and the words come to the audience simultaneously from the voices of singers and the bodies of the dancers.
Concept, music and lyrics of the show are all by Sam Cassidy. Two angels come to earth each bringing half of a human soul to be incarnated in two people who then need to find and love each other for the angels also to be reunited. Four dancers play the two angels and the mortal couple. The stylish and articulate Ainsley Ricketts directs and choreographs and performs as one of the angels. He is accompanied by Chrissy Brooke, Clarice Lanta-Lilly and the especially amazing Jaih Betote. Singers are Eloise Davies and Bluey Robinson.
Originally conceived as a stage show, the whole thing has now been filmed in lockdown and the cast created a bubble of six for three weeks to create it. The technical team came into the studio for the filming and socially distanced from the performers. The result is part film part filmed stage show framed by videographer Nick Ross. Music engineering and lighting design are by Will Vaughan and Matthew Carnazza.
There are some fun fast costume changes and overall great attention to detail, but the piece is overall (probably deceptively) simple. I was sorry not to see more of the singers as glimpses of them revealed that they were clearly contributing to the visual language of the piece as well as its musical landscape.
The music is strong and exciting, very repetitive, but as the piece is only 50 minutes long this serves to imprint its audience with the heart and core of it rather than to bore them. The lyrics are probably the lightest part of the writing, but they are full of passion and the performers, especially Davies, make them resonant and easily accessible through effortless diction and the vocalists certainly add a lot to the piece as a whole.
After a grief in their early lives together witnessed and shared by their angel guardians, the human couple manage to find a way to stay together and age suddenly but beautifully together. The ending is lovely, but I won’t give it away…
Clare Walters
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