Sometimes
innovative musical theater swings for the fences and knocks the ball out of the
part, as happened with Hamilton.
Other times, maybe you really just need to see it on stage. Presumably, that
must be the case for Alecky Blythe’s “verbatim” musical dramatizing the Ipswich
community response to the arrest and prosecution of a serial killer in their
midst. Verbatim in this context means the word-for-word transcriptions of
interviews and media reports as they were spoken, but duly manipulated to make
the speakers sound as petty and narrow-minded as possible. The good people of
Ipswich endure another media feeding frenzy in Rufus Norris’s adaptation of London Road (trailer here), which opens this
Friday in New York.
Before
the Ipswich Ripper case, the London Road area was a respectable working class
neighborhood with middle class pretensions (Brexit country). It used to be the sort of place you
could feel safe raising a family, but the construction of a new stadium changed
traffic patterns and brought street walkers into the residential district
(literally right in front of their homes). Longtime denizens understandably
resented the intrusion, which inevitably colored their response to the brutal
murders. Blythe and co-lyricist Adam Cork clearly took pains to cherry pick
every “had it coming to them” quote, doing their best to cast the residents as
callous moralizers. That is an easy position to take if you live in a coop on
Central Park West or a tony flat in the Barbican district. However, anyone who
has worried about property values as they worked like a mule to pay their
mortgage will take a more forgiving view.
One
thing is certain. London Road confirms
the greatness of songwriters like Ira Gershwin, Johnny Mercer, Cole Porter, Yip
Harburg, and Dorothy Fields, because it proves memorable lyrics do not “just
happen.” Frankly, none of the verbatim libretto rings with either profundity or
musicality. Nor is there any natural rhythm to the stray extracts Cork set to
music, which gives them all a rather plodding sameness. Good luck trying to hum
any of these selections. They are also completely unfair to the neighborhood
residents. How would like your awkward words of greeting at a community board
meeting set to music and repeated dozens of times over, in the most
unflattering manner possible? That’s exactly what happens to poor Julie, the
chair, played by Olivia Colman at her iciest.
