Rolls of toilet paper wildly unspool from the stage and spew over the audience during a climactic moment during the second act of The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical.
Such a not-so-special effect accurately reflects the quality of this minor musical and its stinky production, which opened on Wednesday at the Longacre Theatre.
Don’t get me wrong: I have no issues with musicals, such as The Lightning Thief, that are aimed for kids and their folks who spring for tickets. Several Disney shows are charmers. Heaven knows that Wicked speaks significantly to my inner tween self. I even liked Be More Chill, a cute musical that eluded Broadway popularity last season.
[Read Elysa Gardner’s ★★★ review here.]
Speaking of Be More Chill, that late musical’s talented book writer and smart director, respectively Joe Tracz and Stephen Brackett, execute similar chores on The Lightning Thief, which is adapted from Rick Riordan’s bestseller novel for youngsters.
Too bad they yield such a dud. The Lightning Thief makes Be More Chill look like Der Rosenkavalier.
An increasingly tiresome outing, this overlong, patchy, at times crudely realized, two-act tuner will likely be a more effective show whenever its makers trim the piece back to 90 minutes.
Riordan’s present-day yarn concerns teens who discover they are the half-blooded children of mortals and (apparently still powerful) Greek gods and goddesses.
In Tracz’s repetitive script, a major chunk of the musical’s first act sees Percy (Chris McCarrell) trying to figure out which immortal figure might possibly be his dad even as demons such as a Minotaur materialize in order to destroy him.
Finding refuge in a Long Island summer camp of other teen demi-gods, Percy teams up with the extremely smart Annabeth (Kristin Stokes), an offspring of Athena, and the goofy Grover (Jorrel Javier), satyr son of an unidentified deity. They set forth across the country on a quest to recover a stolen lightning bolt.
En route, although they’re stuck for a long time in New Jersey, these plucky kids overcome several creepy creatures such as Medusa—weirdly resembling Norma Desmond here—and, oh wow, later zoom down to Hades by elevator for a visit. (Of course, they could walk right across the street to see Hadestown, a far more entertaining show, but let’s not get into meta-theatrics.)
Anyway, amid the story’s sword fights and mythological references, songwriter Rob Rokicki provides loud bursts of pulsating, often angst-y, rock music. His songs about girl empowerment and neglectful dads sound perfunctory, but “D.O.A.,” an R&B-style number for the Hades sequence, as fired up by Jalynn Steele’s red-hot vocals, proves to be pretty catchy.
The lead performers agreeably inhabit their generic individuals, while Ryan Knowles, Sarah Beth Pfeifer, and James Hayden Rodriguez join everybody in depicting sundry characters. A few incidental figures are rendered extremely broadly—Javier screams through a role as a sour camp counselor—but then, there’s nothing much subtle about The Lightning Thief.
Although the musical is mostly a yawn for adults (and probably smarter kids), sub-par visuals make it even a less attractive event. The production looks so cheap visually that let’s be kind and not name the designers. Industrial scaffolding can only go so far to create places effectively, while the cheesy effects for the story’s monsters and miracles are heralded by blasts of white lights meant to bedazzle viewers into not seeing the stagecraft. There is not an inch of magic anywhere on the stage, unfortunately.
It’s my understanding that The Lightning Thief plans to be in residence at the Longacre for a limited engagement through the coming holiday season. It’s likely a show that many will want to miss.
The Lightning Thief opened October 16, 2019, at the Longacre Theatre and runs through January 5, 2020. Tickets and information: lightningthiefmusical.com.
