ajhlovestheatre

WILD ABOUT YOU – in Concert

Music and Lyrics by Chilina Kennedy

Book by Eric Holmes

directed by Nick Winston

Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London – 25 & 26 March 2024

https://lwtheatres.co.uk/whats-on/wild-about-you-a-new-musical-in-concert/

Based on Broadway singer/actress/songwriter Chilina Kennedy’s 2015 album, Wild About You is an edgy but generic folk-rock musical receiving its world premiere here in a concert version, ahead of a planned developmental run “during the 2024-25 season” according to the shows website? In all honesty, this isn’t a concert version at all, but a fully staged realisation of a show that is clearly still in need of quite a lot of work.

The piece was previously workshopped with two separate titles (Without Her and Call it Love) and watching Eric Holmes’s script unfold, it isn’t particularly obvious why this third title was alighted on, beyond the fact that it’s the title of one of the more striking songs. Wild About You isn’t essentially a love story, or at least not in the traditional sense, and nor is it particularly wild, although some of the music rocks out a bit. It centres on amnesiac Olivia (Rachel Tucker) who at the beginning is in hospital trying to piece together her extraordinarily messy romantic and family history, with the help of a smart-talking nurse (Todrick Hall, all “yasss gurl” attitude and comic asides) who has clocked off his shift but is fascinated by our heroine’s plight.

Tucker has one of the rangiest powerhouse voices in the business, and Kennedy’s songs certainly give it a work out. The score is a relentless succession of big, bombastic moments, moderately tuneful but all pitched at such a level of fevered emotionalism that the overall effect is more exhausting than exhilarating. Tucker is ill-served by Holmes’s book which serves up probably the most self absorbed musical theatre heroine since Norma Desmond, who Tucker recently and stunningly played on Nicole Scherzinger’s nights off over at the Savoy. She doesn’t get to shine nearly so brightly here, albeit through no fault of her own.

Olivia is a sexually careless, emotionally incontinent mess with whom people seem to fall in love for no very intelligible reason. Any charm she has is due to Tucker’s innate likability rather than any indications from the head-turningly inconsistent writing. She spends most of the show looking tense in a petticoat, with her shoulders hunched, arms stiff and fists clenched; it’s particularly frustrating when you’re aware of what this fine artist is capable of.

The first half is a bit like Next To Normal but with added lesbianism as she tries to sort her head out in a hospital setting, while wailing, riffing and generally singing everything to the absolute max, leading her husband and a male and female lover up the romantic garden path, and getting pregnant. In act two she basically turns into a female version of Billy Bigelow from Carousel as she tries to influence her now grown up son from the other side of the grave.

We never find out what she dies of. Belting maybe? Anyway, the gear change between the two acts is bewildering. The first half is whimsical (Olivia is prone to making ‘Bad Day Boxes’ filled with things to cheer up loved ones when they’re feeling blue), then angsty and a little abrasive, while the second seems to be going for the tear ducts, yet we haven’t been invested enough in the characters to be moved by their plight. It’s comes at you with a numbing welter-load of unearned emotion and much of the dialogue wouldn’t sound out of place in one of the trashier US daytime soaps.

Hall crops up in drag after the interval as a comically opinionated “heavenly friend” figure, and Olivia’s son Billy (Jamie Muscato, singing up a storm but given insufficient material to create anything but a clichéd character) goes on a journey of self discovery. Meanwhile, the adults glower and swear at each other. Olivia’s final moment, warbling “I will always be here” from behind a wall of frosted glass, her face pressed up against it and her palms splayed, feels more like a threat than a promise, the chilly uplighting giving Tucker the unfortunate appearance of something from a horror film, surely not the intended effect.

It’s hard to see what attracted Will & Grace’s Eric McCormack to this strange piece for his West End debut, but he gives it his creditable all as Michael, Olivia’s bewildered, religious husband, although his singing isn’t really up to the standard of that of his colleagues. Oliver Tompsett sounds sensational as his love rival and has sufficient stage presence to almost cover up that the role is so weakly written as to barely be there. Hall is often hilarious, sometimes distractingly so, but the only performer that really rises above the material is Tori Allen-Martin as Jessica, the artist friend who falls for Olivia. A natural comic with an extraordinary emotional availability and a gorgeous voice, Allen-Martin is mesmerising, and makes Jessica’s story arc mostly convincing, despite the writing.

The songs are well-crafted but start to sound a little samey, and still feel like a record album on stage rather than a true theatrical score. Nick Winston’s production is in decent shape given the weaknesses of the book but feels dwarfed in the cavernous Drury Lane auditorium. A show on this scale’s natural home is somewhere like the larger houses at Southwark Playhouse rather than one of the grandest auditoriums in the country.

It’s still very much a work-in-progress, and much of that work needs to be focussing on making the heroine funnier, more relatable. The religious overtones, mostly connected to McCormack’s character, are intriguing but are currently a bit of a red herring, and I’m not sure the lurch into celestial sitcom at the top of the second half really works. The bizarre scene and duet where a high-as-a-kite Billy sees his dead Mom also needs a drastic rethink. As it is, Wild About You consists of a bunch of very talented singer-actors struggling with an incoherent, derivative book and a challenging but only intermittently soaring set of songs.