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Past Reviews Off Broadway Reviews |
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The New York Musical Theatre Festival 2015
Plenty, as it turns out. Though Frederick has done an admirable job of constructing the disjointed world for this young lady to comment on, he's demonstrated considerably less facility with the comments themselves. Being an adolescent with no particular talent and a chintzy MIDI keyboard, she plunks out simple tunes (which, prerecorded, play lifelessly for us through the sound system) that might pinpoint her state of mind, but alight on our ears more as endurance tests. A kid's stunted viewpoint of what the world is and how it should behave, ornamented with endlessly repeated lines and refrains that never expand their subject, may sound fine in theory, but stop the show dead whenever they occur. Considering that there's no singing at all until the second scene, and the 90-minute evening fades out on total, awkward silence, this too often feels like a musical that's yearning to be a play. That's especially heartbreaking given the innate potential it possesses for being a good one. Frederick weaves intriguing threads of story around both the girl's friend, Ciara (Oriana Lada), and the boy she meets while selling cotton candy at the fair (Barrett Riggins), telling us a great deal about how she thinks about and is affected by sex, love, and more platonic bonds. And when the girl learns that neither is quite who she needs them to be, she becomes awash in new possibilities that manifest themselves in both scenes of desperate ache and more of those repetitive, directionless songs. (Director Taylor Norton has made all this as clear as would seem possible.) Lada and Riggins are solid contributors, fixing each of their main characters at the crossroads of youth and shattered innocence, without ever unduly stressing the Important Overtones. Frederick pulls things in the opposite direction, dressing the girl in a cloak of quiet flamboyance that, one suspects, is supposed to convey how able she is to star in her own saga when she's alone. But Frederick's monotonous, Midwest Valley Girl speech patterns are, again, primarily tedious: He's just working too hard to do too little to convince us of too much. Perhaps the most intoxicating issue of this show is: Why does Frederick play the girl himself? Though he drops hints this is due to her gender or sexual identity, they're not resolved, and this is left as one more mystery for us to leave the theater pondering. Such touches keep you engaged after the lights go down the last time, so you'll remember Summer Valley Fair as a whole. But shouldn't you also remember the music that defines the life we're never supposed to forget? Good luck with that.
Summer Valley Fair
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