Once finds magic in melody
Award- winning musical takes its sweet time arriving at its destination
Pretty melodies.
That isn’t all it takes to make a musical fly, but without them, any musical — no matter how laden with Spider sense- sized spectacle — is toast.
Happily for the audience that packed the Jubilee Auditorium on Tuesday night, Once, the 2012 Tony Award winner for Best Musical ( along with seven other Tonys!) is jam- packed with beautiful melodies, romantic chemistry, humour, and cleverly subtle choreography.
It also contains a sweet sadness that makes a rare sort of Broadway experience: It’s as intimate as a kitchen party ( held in the cavernous Jubilee could be), even though it’s also as catchy as you hope every musical will be.
It’s also not terribly complicated.
Once unfolds in Dublin, in pubs and the repair shop/ apartment where an aspiring singersongwriter Guy ( sturdy Stuart Ward), with a near- dead dream, grinds away his days helping get the suck back into broken vacuum cleaners, while keeping his widowed Da ( Scott Waara), with whom he shares the upstairs apartment, company.
Guy has a sweet voice that croons out a series of passionate love songs he composed for an ex who fled to New York some time ago, that catch the ear of Girl ( Dani de Waal), a Czech emigre with a broken vacuum who offers to pay him to fix it by playing him some Mendelssohn on the house piano in the pub she works in.
De Waal’s Girl has a wonderful deadpan Eastern European wit that cuts through the Irish tendency toward hopeless romanticizing and mythologizing every moment of their lives — and she’s a fine pianist to boot.
She also comes complete with a complicated personal backstory that prevents Once from becoming the simple boy- meets- girl love story you anticipate.
It turns out this Dublin is part of the European Community, where entire clans of Poles and Czechs have migrated to work at menial jobs like managing the local grocery store, like Andruj ( Alex Nee), a skinny little striver with a job interview that he hopes will take him one more rung up the ladder.
Everyone in Once has a guitar, or accordion, or a sad song to perform — even Da, a widower for one year, who turns his grief into an exquisite ballad.
The other thing, besides the perfectly crafted melodies, that will catch your attention at Once is the tempo. Rather than unfolding in big, brassy set pieces, with knock ’ em down musical numbers — it unfolds on pub time.
The set is itself a dishevelled Dublin pub, where the pre- show audience is invited up to mingle ( drinks are available, too) and before you’ve even had a chance to retreat to your seats, pub music breaks out onstage.
The scenes that unfold, with most of the cast onstage throughout, feel improvised and informal — like a conversation over a couple pints.
They’re not improvised at all — in fact, they’re deceptively simple, laden with discreetly innovative choreography that increases the show’s intimacy and gives it a true sense of musical community.
But Type A personalities might find themselves pulling out their hair and tapping their watches, because Once — directed with lo- fi charm by Tony winner John Tiffany — takes its sweet time arriving at its destination. ( With not a smartphone in sight!)
Girl hatches a plan to help Guy make a record — the idea, she says, is to record it in 24 hours, then take it to New York, where “a fat man smoking a fat cigar” will discover Guy and give Once its happy ending.
It sounds like a line out of a 1950s musical about the American dream, and you get the sense that it might not go so well for Guy — but thanks to Stuart Ward’s winsome performance as an emotionally bruised young man trying to get unstuck and launch his career, the results matter less than the journey Guy undertakes with Girl, the first person in a long time who believes in him.
Di Waal and Ward display lots of old- time chemistry, so much so that even if the destination is so familiar, you can see it coming from the cheap seats in the Jube, you can’t help but enjoy its sweet melody just the same.