Book, Music and Lyrics: Olly Novello
Director: Gerry Tebbutt
When a new chamber musical is subtitled “The Drama School Audition Musical”, it brings with it both expectation and trepidation. Will it be A Teen Chorus Line, or High School Musical with even more jazz hands?
Olly Novello’s The Verge of Forever is neither. It concentrates instead on two teenagers, Leo and Marie, in that critical period from A Levels to the start of university. That the undergraduate courses they are both pursuing are performing arts based seems incidental (save for one song where Scarlett Ayers’ Marie attempts a self-tape admissions audition). Instead, the focus is on the pair’s relationship, which strains as Marie’s wealth of offers stacks up against Leo’s paltry one.
Focusing on a couple’s relationship, especially at such a crucial juncture of their lives, has the potential for passionate highs and lows, the stuff of which great musicals are made. However, The Verge of Forever seems intent on not developing its characters at all. Leo (played by understudy Finlay McKillop, subbing for an indisposed Novello) spends more time singing about getting catfished on a dating app by a woman in her 70s than he does letting us in on who he is or what motivates him.
The pair’s tentative meeting online – where they have to navigate how much to engage with each other’s social media posts – is amusingly covered in The Instagram Tango. But that is about as deep as Novello’s characterisation of these two young people gets. McKillop and Ayers occasionally tell the audience what their characters get up to between songs, speaking in the third person. This is how we discover that they have fallen in love – something which one would have thought should be observed through song, dialogue between characters or even body language, all of which are fundamentally absent.
Novello sets his musical very specifically between 2019 and 2021, which means that his characters, already geographically separated, become forcibly kept apart by lockdowns. This scenario is never really exploited, though – without dates projected onto The Other Palace’s studio walls and the brief inclusion of a paper face mask, one might never even know.
But the separation from his girlfriend does play into the anxiety expressed by Leo, who becomes more unreasonable and controlling throughout. However, all of Novello’s songs are performed with such a loud performance track that both actors are forced to relying on belting out for much of the work. This gives McKillop little room to express the range of emotion needed to properly articulate Leo’s change in behaviour. When everything starts with a high level of mania, there’s little place left to go.
The result is a frenetic, unengaging show where it becomes impossible to empathise with either of its characters and care about how they treat, or are treated by, the other. And for any musical with a romantic relationship at its core, that is fatal.
Continues until 20 August 2023
