You Are Here review – 1969 moon landings spark musical midlife adventure
Two men walked on the moon in the summer of 1969. Ten more followed in their footsteps over the next three years. All giant leaps for man – but what did it mean for womankind? You Are Here, given its UK premiere by the new musical-theatre company the Grey Area, imagines the moon’s pull on a suburban Chicagoan, Diana.
Her Sunday nights have usually been spent with her husband, Gerard, watching the mock heroics of Bonanza, until the weekend when the lunar broadcast beams in some reallife heroes. Awestruck by their adventures, the same evening Diana drifts out of her house, into the dark, and on to a train going to the city for a spontaneous trip in which she revels in, and occasionally recoils from, her own independent spirit.
With music and lyrics by Neil Bartram, and a book by Brian Hill, You Are Here is strongest when contrasting Diana’s over-familiar domestic routine with her newfound liberty. Checking into a hotel, she marvels at spending a week’s grocery budget on a single night. The best number is the catchy and uplifting My New To-do List, which sees her jubilantly substituting her usual humdrum engagements with sightseeing.
Wendi Peters seizes the lead role, switching between Diana’s inbuilt timidity and the gritty tenaciousness that made her such a force as Cilla on Coronation Street. You just wish there was more range in the often syrupy score. Hill’s script has some fanciful touches (the “sea of tranquility” is likened to a big hotel comforter; the astronauts are marshmallow men) but like the lyrics it tends towards signposting, rather than suggesting hidden depths. Still, Peters is compelling, particularly when conveying how time has crept up on Diana. When she married at 18, she remarks, she never realised quite how long her life would be.
Rebecca McKinnis, Jordan Frazier and Phil Adèle work collectively as the voices in Diana’s head – sometimes taunting, sometimes comforting, as she navigates the hurdles of travelling alone. Director Matthew Rankcom’s high point is staging Diana’s trip to a restaurant, when she is marooned on a table for four in the middle of the room and her three co-stars become a slinky, hip-swaying chorus who delight in her embarrassment.
Elsewhere, McKinnis plays Diana’s comically superior, classier friend Joan and a brittle receptionist. Frazier is the warm-hearted maid Ruby who, al
though younger, recognises what it is to start a new chapter in your life; she secures Diana a job and shows her one of the city’s black neighbourhoods, which Diana has only seen from TV footage of the previous year’s riots. Adèle is a college dropout haunted by combat experiences and, in a thinner role, Ruby’s neighbour. The supporting actors share the voice of the disapproving, controlling Gerard who Diana imagines as the invisible man in a song of that name that evokes the distracting ghost of Kander and Ebb’s Mr Cellophane from Chicago.
Libby Todd’s efficient and clever set design plays with the notion of an eclipse in Diana’s life and presents two overlapping moons as a stage. Aided by Alex Musgrave’s lighting, it switches from cold hotel reception to Ruby’s cosy apartment. Concentric moons form a striking backdrop, with musicians Laura Bangay (keys), Verity Simmons (cello) and Hannah Lawrance (reeds) performing above. Before the space race, Georges Méliès imagined a man in the moon. Rankcom redresses that with the striking image of Diana silhouetted within a circle.
If the songs don’t take off quite as often as they might, this modest musical is given a likable production and it doesn’t take long to adjust to the wobbly acrylic sheets that separate audience bubbles, creating rows of podlike viewing cubicles. The moon, the show suggests, belongs to all of us and is there to inspire our own voyages of self-discovery.
At Southwark Playhouse, London, until 12 June. The matinee and evening performances on 22 May will be livestreamed.