(seen at the afternoon performance on 20th July 2023)
There is a certain type of Broadway musical that the monkey never manages to connect with. It is the type about 20th and 21st century “artistic” New York 20-somethings bemoaning their lot that their creativity is unrecognised and all their personal issues are overwhelming and so important that they must be shared in song.
“Rent” fell into that category, so does this. A Black 25 year old man nicknamed “Usher” because it is his job – usher at “Disney’s The Lion King” on Broadway – wants to write a musical about a Black Broadway Usher writing a musical.
He brings in his homosexuality and the attitudes of his father, mother, family, friends and the wider male gay community towards him.
The whole thing is done through the medium of six other characters called his “Thoughts” (numbered 1 to 6), who also play the other people in his life from parents to hookups as required.
It gets off to a promising start, Kyle Birch (alternate Usher, Kyle Ramar Freeman being unavailable) is at work, being asked the sort of questions the British musical “Ushers” satirises, and dreaming of what he will write next.
Michael R. Jackson, who writes the whole thing – book, music and lyric – lands the first number with a little humour. Sadly, there are another 13 numbers to come, each pretty much indistinguishable from the last.
Plenty of references to Broadway that those outside it will have to Google later. Even more to being gay, young, filled with religious guilt, lust and repression.
The show does spring briefly to life with sequences involving meeting an interesting stranger on a train (sadly a figment of imagination, as it could have been the springboard for a proper storyline), and something about an “Inner White Girl.”
An exceptionally explicit Grindr encounter (if you know what Grindr is, you will get the drift, if you do not, just stay away from the entire show unless broadminded) torpedoes the whole thing for anyone seeking intellectual satisfaction within the piece. That it descends to this level without making any greater impact emotionally than a well-crafted song might, demonstrates the weakness in the abilities of the creative team and lack of satisfaction for those watching.
Director Stephen Brackett and Choreographer Raja Feather Kelly do well to fill the vast Barbican stage with movement. Sightlines are excellent and both have the knack of making the small cast perform as large or intimate as required, sometimes even within a single scene.
Arnulfo Maldonado comes up with a surprise in the set, more than one for the big finish. Sadly, Drew Levy’s sound design loses words for the front centre stalls, while Jen Schriever’s lighting undoes some excellent early work painting the edges of the auditorium by burning out the retinas of everybody trying to watch the final number.
That Usher tries to explain how he came by his show's title and fails – something to do with infinite feedback of experiences lived, in a nutshell – rather sums up this experience. The show gets stuck in an unrelentingly immature emotional cycle from which it cannot grow without help which never arrives.
Certainly a show for the younger generation who are brought up on this style of shallow self-analysis without self-awareness and self-actualisation. Those who can recognise exactly that will find little satisfaction in this piece.
A curiosity of America today, that is mostly for the curious.
1 star.