Once, A New Musical

Fuck it. I'm going out of order. I'm a few shows behind, but I'm going to jump to today's because I want to talk about it while it's still fresh. Not that I have any expectation that it's going to slip from my mind that soon. It's just that it was so, so good.

I didn't see the movie Once in the theater. For some reason I didn't expect to like it very much in spite of all the good buzz. But when I finally did see it, I thought it was a wonderful movie--warm and sweet and tender, if a little thin. I'm going to go ahead and say that the stage version is incredibly faithful to the movie, but if anything, the emotions have been refined and this boy meets girl story maintains the intimacy and realness of the movie while somehow blowing the emotions up bigger than life. It's really just a love story between two people and their music and how their love for each other may not be strong enough to overcome life's complications, but at the very least, it strengthens their songs.

As soon as you enter the theater, the bulk of the cast is already on the stage which is not only designed to look like a bar but is actually a fully functional one. Audience members are invited to head on stage and grab a drink before the show and during intermission. And the ten or so cast members up there perform music together, singing and playing their instruments straight through until ever so subtly, the show itself begins. Steve Kazee as the guy (the guy and girl aren't given names and somehow this doesn't feel gimmicky) performs a song as a busker. And then in a smoky mirror at the back of the stage, you catch sight of Cristin Milioti as the girl, awestruck in dusty lighting. I wish I could say why I teared up at that moment, but I can't quite place it. It's simply one of those rare moments when everything seems perfectly aligned--actor, set, lighting, song. And the simplicity of it combined with this beautiful, dreamlike transition to the world of the show is complete. So before the two leads in this everyday tragedy have spoken to each other, I was already misty. A feeling that didn't go away for the duration of the show.

Milioti and Kazee are fantastic. He plays the guitar; she the piano. Her accent is Czech; his is Irish. Between them, they carry the bulk of the show (the ensemble is brilliant, but the heavy lifting is all on the leads--a weight they bear with ease). But let's talk about that ensemble for a moment. The actors also handle the music and are the stagehands and are called upon to handle Steven Hoggett's astonishing choreographed movement. And while none has more than a couple scenes of their own, they register so fully from Anne Nathan as the girl's mother Baruska seeming sexy and matronly and a little devilish at the same time to Paul Whitty's brash, silly, overbearing, lovable shop owner and Elizabeth Davis as Reza, the sexy Czech girl who loves to seduce men, cares deeply about her friends and family, and is there for the people she loves.

Hoggett also choreographed Black Watch and American Idiot, and I've mentioned him with regard to those shows before. I'm starting to think he might be one of the most singular voices in theater today, putting a very modern dance style on stage while making it accessible to the audience and working with actors who aren't dancers. There's a stylized moment showing someone being folded into an embrace that I think might be the most beautiful three seconds I've ever seen on stage (I could be exaggerating, but I might actually not be).

Another moment turns the body of someone who has kneeled to cry into part of the cityscape of Dublin by way of a subtle and lovely use of lights. And that's the thing about this show: the whole is wonderful and tremendously moving, but there are these little tiny moments of stage magic that are so well in tune with the show itself that they bolster and deepen everything happening at the heart of the story with GUY and GIRL. Everything seems effortless only because you know there's a team of people behind the scenes and an ensemble on stage all working together perfectly, all on the same page. Whether it's a group a capella song or a few bars of transitional music, every note adds to the show even though the songs aren't actually integrated into the piece in a traditional way. This is a show about musicians, and the numbers performed are almost exclusively their own, just reinforced and expanded by this on stage band.

Every cynical shred of me thought that this could end up being just another cheap ploy to turn a movie into a musical in order to cash in on the film's popularity. Seeing it, you feel exactly how unlikely it is that anyone involved did this without the fullest and deepest commitment instead to putting together a show that honored and enriched the movie itself. Rumor has it that even though the show hasn't opened Off-Broadway yet, the producers are looking for a Broadway theater to transfer it. Everyone should root for it to happen. It's a bittersweet show of true beauty that is as near to perfect as these things can be.