Music and Lyrics: Chilina Kennedy
Book: Eric Holmes
Director: Daniel Edmonds
Torn between multiple lovers and memory loss, Chilina Kennedy and Eric Holmes’ Wild About You is a new musical without an identity that piles on the angst to create a soundtrack that its cast can belt out. Immersed in the problems of lead character Olivia from the start, the show fails to explain why the audience should like or care about this woman or just what it is about her that three people obsess over. It is a promising concept with an amusing book, but you’ll be desperate to break up with Olivia as soon as possible.
Waking up in a hospital room Olivia has lost her memory and with the help of nurse Shay slowly pieces together that she loves Michael and Jess and Thomas, originally at different points in her life but sometimes all at once. Recalling her childhood sweetheart to college lover to adult fling, Olivia goes round and round, gaining a husband here, a child there but never quite finding the love she really wants until an accident sets her free.
Except the audience never learns what the accident is that gives her some form of amnesia, although as the memories come flooding back, like Nye down the road at the National Theatre, Olivia rises from her hospital bed and steps into her own past, recreating scenes as though they are happening for the first time. Conveniently, and unlike true memory loss, the past happily comes back to her in chronological order allowing Kennedy and Holmes to walk the audience through Olivia’s dramatically unfolding life to fit whatever trajectory they have plotted out for her.
Wild About You is a messy and strange, a nub of an idea that changes tack completely in the second act as it focuses instead on Olivia’s now 18-year-old son Billy. But character insight, depth and development are jettisoned in favour of overly sentimental songs and earnest rock ballads about love and feelings; everybody has so many feelings all the time it’s amazing they have time to get any work done. Yet the audience never learns anything about these people, their attraction to one another, the things they have in common or why they are continually drawn back together. People sing about being in love for 2.5 hours but it never feels grounded in anything, the story never makes the audience care.
Kennedy’s music and lyrics are part of the problem, songs all sound the same, each one belted out to showcase the vocal talents of the excellent cast who add trills and scales, and yet they are unremarkable, you forget about them even as you’re hearing them for the first time. Holmes’ book fares better and there is some good work here in the snarky dialogue that begins to build the relationships, bringing humour and reality to the interactions where the songs try to bombard you with faux emotions, so there is scope to rebalance Wild About You to include more conversations that might give it the character and scenario development it needs.
Performed by a strong cast including Rachel Tucker as Olivia and Eric McCormack as Michael who have little substance to work with, the superb Tori Allen-Martin brings real shades of meaning to the lovelorn but cool Jess who deserves to be the focus of this show while Todrick Hall snaffles all the laughs as nurse Shay who brings a lightness that Wild About You sorely lacks.
Runs until 26 March 2024
