Precisely eight years and one week ago, New York Theatre Workshop opened an unlikely sounding new-style musical set in Dublin, based on a little-known, low-budget film musical by Irish director/screenwriter John Carney. This turned out to be Once, a jewel of a musical that forged a way of its own, a rare case in which content dictated unconventional but uncannily effective form.
Now we return to NYTW for a second Dublin-set musical based on another Carney film, with librettist Enda Walsh, designer Bob Crowley, and musical arranger Martin Lowe repeating their assignments. Given the outsized success of the Tony and Olivier-winning Once, the new Sing Street is not quite as unlikely sounding, arriving with high expectations. Unreasonably high and unrealized, it turns out. Sing Street turns out to be slightly better-than-average. The magic of something like Once, alas, rarely comes twice.
While Carney’s 2007 film told of a decidedly unlikely pair of street singers who meet and engage in what turned out to be an impossible and unconsummated affair, the plot of the 2016 Sing Street is altogether mundane. A teenager gets transferred from a posh school—his battling parents are broke, don’t you know?—and finds himself in a poor Catholic school run by a sadistic but apparently not sexually abusive priest. After a bit of harsh bullying, the lad decides to form—you guessed it, didn’t you?—a rock band so exuberant that even the bully starts taking piano lessons and within one scene is up there playing the keyboards in eyeshadow. And, yes, when last seen, the villainous priest, appalled by the boys playing on the premises against his direct orders, storms and screams and runs out onto East 4th Street like the Wicked Witch of Oz when confronted with a bucket of water.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★★ review here.]
If this sounds like a compendium of overly worn storylines, that’s because it is. Which is why Sing Street—the boys name their band Sing Street as a play on their academy, Synge Street Christian Brothers School—has a hard time enchanting us despite the talented and likable post-highschoolers playing their hearts out to beat the band. We’ve seen it all time and again in such musicals as School of Rock, Mean Girls, 13, and who knows how many episodes of how many television shows through the years. The material, as shaped by Walsh and director Rebecca Taichman (of Indecent), does not transcend that weary plot.
Despite appearances, Sing Street is only a distant cousin to Once; the songs come from Gary Clark and Carney (among myriad songwriters), as opposed to Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, who wrote “Falling Slowly” and the rest of the score of the earlier musical. The different songwriters seem not to be the problem in this case, though; nor is the absence of the earlier musical’s innovative stagers, John Tiffany and Steven Hoggett. It’s those storylines.
That said, Sing Street is engagingly mounted and performed. Nineteen-year-old Englishman Brenock O’Connor makes an ingratiating presence as Conor, serving as ringleader of the boys and the evening’s lead singer. Zara Devlin plays a local girl who joins the boys in their music videos. The girl has a hazy backstory—is she being forced into porn by her 30-something boyfriend?—which goes unresolved and unexplained, strewing a couple of red herrings into the mix.
The band members are uniformly engaging, while Martin Moran does as much as he can as bad Brother Baxter. Amy Warren and Billy Carter play the battling parents, with helpful performances from Gus Halper and Skyler Volpe as the hero’s older siblings. The ever-valuable Anne L. Nathan—whose long line of credits includes both Thoroughly Modern Millie and Once, in which she played the heroine’s mother—adds much-needed warmth and serves as the supportive adult in the room.
The show is dominated by a back wall representing the unrelenting Irish Sea, with set designer Crowley and lighting designer Christopher Akerlind combining for some evocative visuals (although Sing Street doesn’t offer Crowley the same opportunities he had with the earlier musical). Lowe, too, does much of what he did last time but is hampered by the natural harshness of all those electronic guitars and keyboards. Choreographer Sonya Tayeh, of Moulin Rouge!, keeps the boys hopping.
While I’m not one of those people who go in for multiple viewings of hit musicals, I had reason to see Once six times—and the show remained enchanting throughout. Sing Street, despite some weaknesses, makes an adequately entertaining evening; but I expect once is enough.
Sing Street opened December 16, 2019, at New York Theatre Workshop and runs through January 26, 2020. Tickets and information: nytw.org
