A low-key pleasure, the musical Once has arrived at Pitlochry festival theatre, opening Alan Cumming's debut season as artistic director. This stripped-down show, based on the 2007 film by John Carney, features a book by Enda Walsh and songs by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova. It defies the typical razzmatazz of musical theatre, offering instead a maudlin set of songs and a depressive story that resists showstoppers.
A Reluctant Musical
When Once first opened on Broadway in 2012, later enjoying a run in London's West End, it was greeted with surprise. It is an anti-musical, unusual not just for its stripped-down production by John Tiffany on a barroom set by Bob Crowley, featuring scuffed mirrors, wooden panelling, and gloomy corners. The folksy atmosphere includes a preshow singalong and an ensemble of actor-musicians who muck in without fanfare. The movement sequences by Steven Hoggett owe everything to the angularity of physical theatre, nothing to the high-kicking spirit of A Chorus Line.
Low-Key Pleasures and Slick Production
On one hand, this makes Once a low-key pleasure, a show that welcomes you in instead of cajoling. Tiffany's remount brings back the original creative team, and it has a pleasing slickness and economy of means. The music, rhythmically complex and sensitively arranged by Martin Lowe, bubbles up organically. The production has the confidence to be silent or stately.
On the other hand, the story is short on peaks of passion. A lovelorn Dublin busker, played by Dylan Wood, is dragged out of disillusionment by a brusque young woman from the Czech Republic, played by Lydia White, who is also at a romantic crossroads. Their interaction is enough to make him pick up his guitar again and nearly, but not quite, strike up a relationship with her. With so little at stake and the mood morose, his minor change of fortune makes you less elated than relieved.
The bittersweet ending is emotionally true, even if this brooding show is an autumnal way to kick off a summer season. Once runs at Pitlochry festival theatre until 27 June.
