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<b>music, lyrics & book by Anika Johnson & Barbara Johnston, directed by Ann Merriam
Edge of the Sky, Next Stage Theatre Festival, Factory Theatre, Toronto
January 4-15, 2017
</b>
“Don’t Get Blood on Your Wedding Dress”
With <i>Blood Ties</i>,<i> </i>Anika Johnson and Barbara Johnston have created an unusual and exciting one-act musical. Previously seen in Toronto at various levels of development in 2010 and 2012, the musical also featured in the second season of <i>Orphan Black</i> in 2014 as the musical staged by a community theatre company. This is Toronto’s first chance to see the show since its definitive production at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2014. Johnson and Johnston combine two genres not often associated with each other – the musical and the murder mystery – with great skill, humour and a high level of invention. In so doing they help push musical theatre into new territory.
After a short prologue where the cast sings an eerie Sondheimian chorus that there are some things you just don’t talk about, Johnson and Johnston introduce us to a trio of friends – Franny (Barbara Johnston), Larry (Jeremy Lapalme) and Paul (Carter Hayden) – who have gathered for the hastily announced wedding of their mutual friend Sheila (Anika Johnson). Letting themselves into Sheila’s uncle’s house in search of a bathroom and booze, the threesome discover to their horror that the bathroom is covered in blood and brain tissue. After much venting of distress, Sheila appears and tell her friends that her uncle Conrad (Kent Sheridan) killed himself in the bathroom just earlier that evening. The police having gone, she is setting about to clean the room. Her friends with varying degrees of enthusiasm offer to help. A suicide note is discovered and eventually all seems to be tidy, literally and figuratively, by the time the friends leave. But the three return, each of them sensing that the story is not as straightforward as Sheila has made it seem.
The show is both musically and dramatically inventive. Johnson and Johnston begin the show with radical dissonance and employ it later to chilling effect. The song styles cover a wide range influenced by both folk and rock. The creative duo even writes a patter song modelled after Gilbert and Sullivan for the character Paul about his profession as a doctor. The creators imitate Sullivan further by then repeating Paul’s patter song in counterpoint with songs sung by other characters. Perhaps the duo’s most effective creation is a song for the character Franny, who sings of the joys of having so many lovers, never committing to any of them, while simultaneously suggesting that this does not really provide her any happiness. One of their most inventive songs is another for Paul, who awkwardly tries to tell Franny how much he loves her while the increasingly awkward rhymes of his song reflect his comically turbulent state of mind. Johnson and Johnston also repeat snatches of songs almost as leitmotifs. One these, Sheila’s nursery-rhyme-like verse about marrying, will be as hard to get out of your head as it is for Sheila.
The entire cast works wonderfully as an ensemble both musically and dramatically. One might guess that as performers they are all used to speaking and singing with mics because, since the show is thankfully unamplified, they could all stand to project more so as not to be drowned out quite so often by the accompanying three-piece band.
Director Ann Merriam’s intelligent staging uses two principal set components designed by John Leberg – the bathroom and a beautiful but mysterious forest of clear suspended rods – to great effect so that each one representing a different type of unknown – whether horror or the murky past – comes to symbolize the uncharted moral world the three friends enter when they enter the house. Merriam and the cast also poise the show precisely at the right point between the satirical and the serious so that we can laugh at them but also feel the reality of the increasingly difficult moral dilemmas they encounter.
Johnson and Johnston accomplish far more in only 75 minutes than many other creative teams do in twice or three times that much time. We could stand to know more about Franny, Larry and Paul and how they know Sheila and a repetition at the end of the show’s opening chorus would not be out of place, but Johnson and Johnston are likely all too aware that expanding the musical to a more marketable 90 minutes might upset the piece’s fine balance between comedy and fear. As it is, <i>Blood Ties</i> is a funny, dark, invigorating musical that fully deserves all the acclaim it has received.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a <i>Stage Door</i> exclusive.
Photo: Barbara Johnston and Anika Johnson. ©2012.
For tickets, visit <a href="http://fringetoronto.com/next-stage-festival">http://fringetoronto.com/next-stage-festival</a>.
<b>2017-01-06</b>
<b>Blood Ties</b>