First, her musical CAROLINE... OR CHANGE (2004) opened at the Hampstead Theatre then proved so successful it transferred to The Playhouse, closely followed by her Tony Award-winning musical FUN HOME (2011) opening at the Young Vic. Although I think this is the better musical of the two, there does not seem to be any news as yet of a transfer. We also - briefly - had a touring version of her 2004 musical of THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE.
And now - with a slight air of wagon-jumping about it - The Charing Cross Theatre is staging her 1997 chamber musical VIOLET in a production directed by the Japanese theatre director Shuntaro Fujita. I would say her writing has got better but I find her a slippery composer at best. I always leave a Tesori musical trailing the songs behind me and by the time I have got back home I usually cannot remember a single one. Her songs usually seem to work while you are sitting in the theatre watching the show saying to yourself "ah this song fits well and is well-written" but turns opaque when thought of afterward - the only one where the score seemed to have left an impression has been FUN HOME.
As I said, her numbers occasionally strike me as interesting when I am facing the characters singing them, and she does have a particular knack of writing pastiche pop numbers - the children's bouncy pretend tv-ad song or Jackson 5-style family song in FUN HOME; the radio numbers in CAROLINE... OR CHANGE - but the main book songs tend to run into each other with no change in tone, as opposed to popping off the stage in contrast to each other. Maybe the day she writes both songs and lyrics for a musical she will find a real sustained voice? So to VIOLET... it is based on a short story by Doris Betts called "The Ugliest Pilgrim" and it feels it. It has the air of generic Southern Gothic Americana, a bit like a cut-and-shunt job from Carson McCullers or Horton Foote.
1964: Violet is a young woman who was disfigured in an accident when a young girl, and is travelling on a Greyhound bus with a motley crew of other passengers from North Carolina to Tulsa in the hope that a brash televangelist will be able to perform a miracle on her face. Because of her face, Violet is withdrawn and defensive of any curious people's attention but, despite this, she falls in with a poker game between two soldiers at a rest-stop in Tennessee. Monty is a young corporal who enjoys poking fun at her while Flick, a black sergeant, is more respectful of her and obviously secretly is drawn to her. After she takes umbrage at Monty's joshing, she sits apart from them but Flick seeks her out, attempting to boost her confidence.
The travellers stop-over in Memphis overnight and while out in a bar, Flick is angered when he sees Monty obviously trying it on with Violet. Despite Violet calming him down, Monty later visits her room and they make love. As the bus continues to Fort Worth where the soldiers will leave, Violet and Monty both rehearse how they will jilt the other but at the last minute Monty asks her to meet him at the bus station on her journey back.
Once in Tulsa she seeks out the televangelist who of course disappoints her in not taking her seriously, in her mind's eye she replaces the preacher for her father and rails at him for a lifetime of pain. This catharsis makes Violet think that she has been cured and on the way back home, gets off the bus to find Monty and Flick waiting for her... who will Violet choose?
Sadly book and lyric writer Brian Crawley makes Violet such a chippy, miserable character that it is hard to feel any sympathy for her and, by inference, any of the other characters as they are mostly seen through her eyes. Watching her '11 o'clock' ranting number at the Preacher and her Father, I just watched thinking "Ah you did this so much better in CAROLINE.. OR CHANGE", that time of course helped immeasurably by Sharon D. Clarke's titanic performance.
I was also precluded from any real involvement in Fujita's production by the fact that the sound was amplified so loud I was always aware that though the cast were singing only feet away on the in-the-round stage absolutely no sound came off them, everything blared out of the overhead speakers so by the end of the show I had convinced myself that they were all miming to a cd being played somewhere; in a space as small as the Charing Cross Theatre this is ridiculous. I will give Shuntaro Fujita's direction a nod for making the pace fairly quick with it's minimal staging of tables and chairs being utilized well, it's just a shame that it held no real interest.
Kaisa Hammarlund, who played the narrator Allison in FUN HOME, certainly gave her all as Violet, it's just a shame that she could not make the character interesting. There was good playing between Matthew Harvey as Monty and Jay Marsh as Flick, while Kieron Crook as Violet's Father and Kenneth Avery Clark as the Preacher also found moments to make an impression.
So there we go, another rather under-whelming production at Thom Southerland's Charing Cross Theatre, where in truth the only good productions have been his own of RAGTIME and TITANIC. I am happy to have seen VIOLET but I don't think i will be getting on the bus with her again anytime soon.
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