News

Variations on a Nervous Breakdown

• Music and lyrics
• by Jonathan Monro
• Directed by Richard Ouzounian
• At Talk is Free Theatre
• in Barrie, Ont.

Edges

• Music and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul
• Directed by Evan Tsitsias
• An Acting Up Stage Theatre Company production
• At Revival Bar in Toronto

Whither musical theatre? Two new "song cycles" playing in Barrie and Toronto give us a peek at the work of hotly tipped up-and-coming composers and lyricists. These collections of musical short stories should give fans of the art form reason for cheer and soul-destroying, claw-your-corneas-out despair.

In Barrie, Talk is Free Theatre is opening its new downtown theatre with the world premiere of Newfoundland-born composer Jonathan Monro's Variations on a Nervous Breakdown, a piece previously workshopped at the Canadian Stage Company.

When the first song began with someone ordering a latte in a coffee shop, my heart sank. Was Monro yet another myopic young artist unable to look for beyond his experience in the service industry for inspiration?

But no, What's Wrong With the World? uses a java-joint dispute to explore our day-to-day short-sightedness, the difficulty of being empathetic and open to others in an urban environment. And its lyrics are very funny: "Can't you read the flip lid? / It says scalding flipping liquid?"

The song finds a more serious companion in At The Grave, wherein two distraught strangers meet in a cemetery and wonder if they should break convention and approach one another to talk.

In musical theatre, characters traditionally burst into song when their emotions become too much to express through everyday speech; in Monro's work, characters live in a society where it is taboo to express any emotion or anxiety openly, so their inner worlds rumble with stifled song.

In Goodbye, a husband and father can tell his wife about his inner anguish only through a Dear John letter. In The Grocery Store, a woman jabbers about a terrible trip to the store, but she is really grieving over the collapse of her marriage.

Loneliness is a quartet about looking for love and sex on the Internet that treats the longings of its characters with humour and heart and a yearning four-part harmony, as opposed to merely mining the subject for dirty jokes, as in Avenue Q's The Internet is for Porn.

Not that Monro shies away from pure comedy: Rumba Raylene is about a middle-aged waitress with a lazy "s" whose "legacy lisps on" even after her death.

Monro has a real ear for melody and, unlike many modern Broadway composers, even a little rhythm. (In I Wish I'd Grown Up in the 20s, a woman expresses admiration for great composers such as Gershwin and Porter.)

He does make a few missteps in his Variations, however. Nobody Wants a Penny, which gives an internal voice to a cent, is just plain corny, while Who I Am gets mired in soul-searching clichés about "lost little boys."

But under the direction of Toronto theatre critic Richard Ouzounian, a quartet of young musical-theatre performers — Cory O'Brien, Chilina Kennedy, Patricia Zentilli and Monro himself — make a strong case for the composer and lyricist's talent. Their voices are all excellent, though the ladies outshine the men in quickly incarnating memorable characters.

Meanwhile, in Toronto, Edges — another urban-oriented song cycle — has been running on Sunday and Monday nights for a couple of months, with repeated extensions. The songs are by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, an American songwriting duo who, at the age of 21, won the 2007 Jonathan Larson award (named after the late Rent composer).

They're talented tunesmiths, but the lyrical content displays a real lack of maturity. Edges is an evening spent with a quartet of interchangeable, self-involved twentysomethings who go from love affair to love affair, but really love only themselves. The characters don't have careers, scholarly pursuits, political passions or families; they use song to express themselves about such pressing concerns as Facebook.

There are a couple of characters that Edges refers to in songs with real lives and challenges — one who has three kids, another who is going to night school — but they appear only on the periphery, as the object of mockery at a 10-year high-school reunion. An unattractive woman appears in another song, but only as the butt of a joke about sleeping with the "Snapple lady."

As their poor, fellow twentysomething Americans die in Iraq and Afghanistan, the young men and women of Edges mention the outside world only when talking about vacation spots where they found themselves.

The idea that Pasek and Paul are the voice of the "i-generation," as the press release puts it, is, frankly, insulting. Past representatives of generational change in musical theatre — Larson and the creators of Hair and Spring Awakening — at least attempted to grapple with big issues such as the Vietnam War, AIDS, sex, or poverty.

That Edges isn't satire is frightening. I think we're supposed to care about these fools, including — yes — a guy who holds a McJob, but has so much more to offer the world because, inside, he dreams of "cars with jet wings." Get an engineering degree or stick with Pizza Hut, buddy.

The four clean-cut performers — again two guys, two gals — mug a bit too much, but they have fine voices and do their best to invest the weak material with true emotion. Gabi Epstein is the most engaging: she gets the only song with weight, about a woman in an emotionally abusive relationship, and shows good comic timing in another about the man of her dreams turning out to be gay.

Variations on a Nervous Breakdown runs until Dec. 6; Edges runs until Dec. 8.