It has been nearly 20 years since Jason Robert Brown’s two-hander song cycle received its first performance in Chicago. Since then the bittersweet work based on his own first failed marriage has become such a popular chamber piece it must be verging on modern classic status.
This production, directed by Jonathan O’Boyle, was rudely interrupted by Covid, received a new lease of life online and now defiantly returns to the stage in the teeth of the pandemic’s second wave.
Despite this the venue has apparently hung on to most of its capacity. Whereas most theatres have opened by reducing the number of seats, Southwark Playhouse achieves social distancing by inserting transparent perspex sheets between the seats. Almost everyone sits in their own personal booth. This is theatre for the Covid age. Yet what happens on stage more than survives the restrictions.
Oli Higginson is Jewish Jamie and Molly Lynch is Cathy, his “Shiksa Goddess” as Jamie’s first number in the show describes her. Despite the song’s derogatory title it is one of the wittiest, catchiest numbers in the score during which Jamie revels in the shock that his mother and the rest of the “JCC of Spring Valley” will feel when they discover he has fallen for a non-Jewish girl. She has arrived in his life after a long list of Jewish girls whose names make up an entire verse, and whose framed portraits Higginson’s Jamie places on the grand — often-revolving — piano that dominates the stage in O’Boyle’s production.
Yet the optimistic energy of Jamie’s first song is in deep contrast with the introspective opening number sung by Cathy. This brings us to the show’s neat conceit. Because although both protagonists sing about the same relationship, each is doing so in opposing timelines. Cathy’s tender opener I’m Still Hurting is about coping with the emotional aftermath of a failed marriage. Jamie’s is sung in the full flush of new love. And so the opposing trajectories continue until the couple meet in the middle on their wedding day, before Jamie ends up at the relationship’s unhappy finish, and Cathy at its hopeful beginning.
O’Boyle highlights the timeline trickery by having the couple each emerge on to the stage in a blaze of light that suggests a fracture in the universe’s dimension — or something. There are other clever flourishes too, with both Higginson and Lynch taking turns to augment the just visible five-piece band with their own contributions on piano.
Both sing beautifully but it’s Lynch’s showbiz hopeful Cathy who takes the laurel with a performance brimful of lovelorn angst. She is in total command of Brown’s forays into parody, delivering chorus line schtick when it is called for or high comedy during the number Climbing Uphill, which is saturated with the galloping thoughts of someone under pressure during an audition.
Granted, Lynch’s dark, some might say Jewish looks don’t make her an obvious choice as a Jewish boy’s “shiksa goddess” fantasy.
But hey, maybe “every Shapiro in Washington Heights” with whom Jamie has “had Shabbas dinners on Friday nights” all looked like Alicia Silverstone.
