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music and lyrics by Adam Cork, book and lyrics by Alecky Blythe, directed by Jackie Maxwell

Canadian Stage, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto

January 23-February 9, 2014

“What If It’s Him”

It happens only once in a lifetime that you see a familiar genre approached in an entirely new way.  But that’s exactly what happens in London Road.  It is a musical like no other since composer Adam Cork has created his music from the inherent music of the spoken word found in interviews held by his “lyricist” Alecky Blythe.  The result is absolutely fascinating and the entire all-star cast gives terrifically powerful performances.  The show is a real mind-opener.  Suddenly you see possibilities in music theatre you didn’t know existed.

Alecky Blythe is a British practitioner of verbatim theatre.  One of her projects focussed on the London Road neighbourhood in Ipswich in Suffolk where everyday life was shattered near Christmas 2006 by the discovery of the bodies of five prostitutes.  The same modus operandi in the deaths led police to link the murders as the work of a serial killer dubbed the Suffolk Strangler.  Blythe conducted extensive interviews with members of the community and media in December 2006 after the bodies had been found but before any arrest had been made.  Six months later she returned to find that the community had come together and had undertaken various projects, such as starting a festival, London Road in Bloom, in an effort to heal itself.  Neither the killer nor his victims is shown.  Instead, Blythe is interested in the effect of the crimes on the community.  Both the residents’ initial shock and the gradual recovery over the next two years make up the musical’s story. 

Part of verbatim theatre is that the actors repeat exactly what interviewees say including all their ums, ers, pauses, stutters and grammatical errors.  The point is to capture the way people really speak.  What makes London Road so revolutionary is the attempt of composer Adam Cork to retain the key elements of verbatim theatre in his score.  Using Blythe’s tapes, Cork annotated the recorded speech as music in order to capture its inherent rhythms and the natural rises and falls in tone of the various interviewees’ speech patterns.  Though Cork does not mention it, this technique was first used by Leoš Janáček (1854-1928) in his operas.  Janáček’s operas, such as Jenůfa (1904) and Kaťa Kabanová (1921) are so distinctive because his musical themes derive from the natural rhythms and tonal patterns of Czech speech that he had so closely studied. 

Blythe and Cork divided the recorded material into 16 choral episodes.  Since there are no rhymes or similar line lengths that one might find in an aria in opera or a song in a musical, Cork gives each episode cohesion by the frequent use of repetition of the key phrase that sets up the episode such as “Everyone Is Very Nervous”, where the neighbourhood expresses its fears, or “It Could Be Him”, where women of the neighbourhood discuss the awful feeling that the murderer could still be among them.  Cork’s instrumental accompaniment takes its cue from the notes used in annotating the speech and often appear similar to the arpeggiation familiar from Philip Glass operas or the pungent rhythmic chords one finds in Kurt Weill.  The combination makes the music of London Road an excitingly new sound unlike any musical you ever heard.                             

The cast of eleven – veterans either of the Stratford or Shaw Festivals or both – are the cream of the crop and it’s a pleasure simply to see them all on stage at the same time.  It’s thrilling to see them all working together in what is essentially a choral musical.  Each of the actors has a base identity as one of the residents of London Road near Number 79 where the killer lived for ten weeks.  Sean Arbuckle and Deborah Hay play an intellectual couple with posh accents and concern mostly for how the murders and news coverage are giving their neighbourhood such negative publicity.  Ben Carlson and Glynis Ranney play a slightly dim couple of a lower class who can barely articulate how the murders have distressed them.  Ranney’s character is the only one who admits that the experience has sent her into a deep depression.  Shawn Wright and Julain Molnar are a brighter couple of the same class as Carlson and Ranney, but rather than turning inwards are full of anger.  George Masswohl and Michelle Fisk are a senior couple and the only ones who manage to keep a calm, rational distance from the events rather than succumbing to the disdain of a couple like Arbuckle and Hay’s.

Damien Atkins, Steve Ross and Fiona Reid all plays characters whose partners, if they have them, we don’t immediately meet.  Reid’s base character is Julie, one of those people who in a time of crisis takes on the role of social organizer as a duty.  Julie is the one to start and organize the London Road in Bloom competition, symbolized by hanging flower baskets, in an effort to turn the neighbourhood’s mood around and change people’s focus from murders to flowers.  The comic highlight for Atkins is playing a TV reporter who needs an exasperating number of takes to file a simple report because he can’t find a simple way of avoiding the word “semen”.   

The musical starts with an AGM of the neighbourhood watch that was set up in the wake of the murders and segues into the London Road in Bloom competition.  The action then turns to look at what life was like on London Road in December 2006 and proceeds to work forward again to the hanging basket competition and after.  In the course of the musical the eleven actors play 63 characters, from policemen and newscasters, denizens of coffee shops and pubs to, in the case of Hay, Fisk and Reid, prostitutes who are too afraid to walk the street any longer.

What emerges is a comprehensive vision of a community both in crisis and in healing after the crisis has past.  In being true to her material, Blythe is unafraid to show us both the good and bad sides of a group coming together.  The five murders bring together people who had lived on the same street but had not necessarily been friendly with each other.  One man (Steve Ross) expresses his xenophobia when he hopes the murderer turns out to be a foreigner so that public outrage will turn against them.  One woman (Fiona Reid), shockingly, wishes she could thank the murderer for getting all the prostitutes off their streets.  Blythe also captures the callousness of the news media in covering the story and in competing to get a news break first.  Her episode with the prostitutes puts the entire action into perspective.  Why did the police wait until a fifth body was found before they took action?  Why did it take these five deaths before the government set up a programme to help prostitutes gets off drugs and off the streets?              

Like the music itself, Jackie Maxwell’s direction is detailed and precise and yet allows the action to flow and build effortlessly.  Despite what might seem gruesome subject matter, the show is filled with humour, from the infelicitous ways that people express themselves (Masswohl’s character speaks of “tarting” up the streets with flowers) to an overall view, both wry and satiric, of human nature’s proclivity to think of the self before others and of its willingness to do nothing to solve a problem until it reaches a crisis.  To reinforce this, Maxwell audaciously stops the show just before the finale to let us hear the actual recording of the three prostitutes.  This makes us experience the celebratory finale both as a necessary corrective and an attempt to forget what should not be forgotten.

The amazing cast makes one wish the members of the Stratford and Shaw Festivals had more occasions to work with each other on such groundbreaking projects.  Their concentration and unflagging commitment to what is admittedly a challenging work is the principal factor in the production’s success.  Because of the new realms of subject matter and composition it opens up, London Road is required viewing for anyone interested in music theatre and its future. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (from top) The cast of London Road; Steve Ross, Glynis Ranney, Deborah Hay and Ben Carlson; Fiona Reid as Julie. ©2014 David Hou.

For tickets, visit www.artsboxoffice.ca.