Reviews 2009
Reviews 2009
✭✭✭✭✩
by William Finn, directed by Daryl Cloran
Acting Up Stage Theatre Company,
Berkeley Street Theatre, Toronto
February 13-March 1, 2009
William Finn’s 1998 musical A New Brain is not about Igor’s journey to harvest organs for his mad master. Instead, it’s an autobiographical musical about a children’s television stuck down with an unusual brain disorder that requires potentially life-threatening surgery. That material may sound even less promising than the story of Igor, but due to the genius of Finn and his collaborator James Lapine, A New Brain is an absolutely charming and inventive musical from first to last staged with great wit and imagination by Daryl Cloran.
When we first meet Finn’s nebbishy alter-ego, Gordon Schwinn (Steven Gallagher), he has reached an impasse writing a new song for Mr. Bungee (Juan Chioran), star of a kiddie show who wears a frog costume. After collapsing during lunch, Gordon is rushed to hospital where his mind mingles present events with memories of the past and hallucinations brought on by his disease. This device prevents the show from becoming a hospital drama by keeping the focus on Gordon’s fear of dying without ever having written anything worth while. There are indeed songs titled “M.R.I. Day” and “Craniotomy,” but they are invariably comic.
The cast is uneven but the majority of the performances are superb. Gallagher, for one, conveys all of Gordon’s naturally confused emotions of humour, fear and pathos. Gordon is exceedingly lucky to have the charismatic Roger (Thom Allison) as his partner, a man with good looks enough for two. Allison has a gorgeous voice to match and his song “I’d Rather be Sailing” is one of the show’s highlights. Barbara Barsky has a plum role as as Gordon’s mother but manages to avoid all the Jewish mother clichés to make her merely overprotective. Her prime solo turn, “The Music Still Plays On,” is a real show-stopper. Chioran’s Mr. Bungee is so delightfully annoying you look forward to his every appearance. Paula Wolfson is convincing as the homeless lady Lisa, whose presence shows there are levels of unhappiness beyond anything the bourgeois characters know.
It’s a rare pleasure that the show is presented unmiked, but this does tend to separate the well-trained old timers who know how to project from some of the newcomers who don’t. Nevertheless, by the time you reach the beautiful final song, “I Feel So Much Spring,” you feel you’ve been on a zany, death-defying but invigorating journey and are ready to take what is good about life a little less for granted.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-02-16.
Photo: Steve Ross, Steven Gallagher and Thom Allison. ©Joanna McDermott.
2009-02-16
A New Brain