‘”Magical” monogamy’
The quintessential folk heroine Barbara Allen gets an Appalachian love affair in this new romantasy promising “Twilight meets Romeo and Juliet”. Mawkish doesn’t even begin to cover it.
Welcome to the year… well, here is where we run into rather serious contextual problems. There is none. A blast of Doc Martens, long denim skirts and other 90s accessories hint at around that time, but all technology, including cars, seems to be absent. The small rural village in the mountains feels hundreds of years ago, yet the music races along in a grungy/rocky/emo vein. This causes more problems down the line.
Lauren Jones is our (at least 16th century, if not earlier) lead Barbara Allen. She’s not at all like the long-skirt-wearing girls in her village – she has short hair, a tapered hem, a lower-cut top, a bad reputation, and dreams of her own, despite them being vague and undefined. Yet when Jones sings, we almost forget the dreamy pixie bad-girl routine. A musical theatre star in the making, able to belt but mainly holding back, she draws each tender note from some of the more effective songs, such as “Wildflower”, and her later sexy, whiskey-swigging Carmen number.
Across from her is Glenn Adamson doing his best Edward Cullen as John the Witch Boy, an immortal mainly invisible to humans, who looks like Peter Pan if he’d started doing crack. Think Gerard Way from My Chemical Romance meets Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (certain people, by that I mean myself, absolute weakness). Twitching, oddly unfamiliar with the world he has been stalking – but again, vocally, when he shrieks and wails through his numbers, we put aside for a second the fringe-flicking-darting-heavy-eyelinered-tortured-rockstar thing.
A war rages in the shadows (as it always does in this genre) while five witches try to lure John back to the fold with a rigged spell, very much like The Little Mermaid, to win the ongoing inter-species conflict. Josie Benson as Conjur Woman, one of the ringleaders, wild eyes flashing, is terrifying, but despite Jonathan Chan’s hardworking lighting and Georgie Rankcom’s racing direction, the supernatural is always tough to charm on stage.
The hex in question, to keep John human, involves a non-adultery clause the lovers must keep – magical monogamy. Having to defy her family’s arranged marriage plans with the local stud, and after a whistle-stop marriage, BA is pregnant almost instantly. Then, shock horror by all and sundry, she is forced to work while pregnant, as John struggles to assimilate into the human world, mainly spending his time fishing. The outlook is full 1890s, parroted by people who look like they’ve jumped out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Feminism? Sexual freedom? Non-toxic masculinity? Not in Appalachia, thank you very much! Even more confusing, the witches seem like allegories of Native Americans as seen by the colonisers: wild, sexually promiscuous, primal – but the complexities of the local Cherokee/Shawnee/Monacan cultures seem too weighty for the show to attempt, or even realise exist.
Setting aside the temporal issues (if one could), such motifs as dying for love, being human is heartbreak, and grief showing one the worthiness of love, etc., roll over us very much like waves on a deeply unimpressed beach. Jonathan Prince’s book and Lindy Robbins, Dave Bassett & Steve Robson’s music and lyrics have shafts of lunar light but are mainly the tritest example of musical theatre mush. Yes, it mirrors both Twilight and Romeo and Juliet, yet without the well-fleshed-out backstory of the former or the poetry of the latter. I still don’t know what the dark of the moon is, and I’m unwilling to try and find out.