The tunes are strong in The Way Back to Thursday

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      Book, music, and lyrics by Rob Kempson. Directed by Briana Brown. A Theatre Passe Muraille production, as part of In Tune 2015. At the Arts Club’s Revue Theatre on Thursday, June 18. Continues in rep until June 21

      The Way Back to Thursday is the featured presentation at In Tune, a biennial event dedicated to the development of new Canadian musicals. It’s also appallingly structured, which has got to make you uneasy about the future of musicals in this country.

      Creator Rob Kempson calls The Way Back to Thursday a song cycle. Fair enough, but the show is still telling a story—badly. It’s about a young guy named Cameron and his doting grandmother, who is known, generically, as Grandma.

      Grandma loves little Cameron to bits. For them, Thursday nights are movie nights, and when Cameron’s parents split up, Grandma steps into a more crucial parenting role. But as Cameron grows up, he’s so freaked out about being gay that, rather than coming out to his number-one confidante, he moves from Etobicoke to Vancouver and cuts her out of his life. She pines and declines—dementia stalks her—as he continues to be self-involved.

      The big, big problem with the narrative is that it’s simplistic and repetitive. Off the top, we get song after song about how much they love one another and how great movie night is. Then, in the latter half, we get song after song about the rift.

      As written, Grandma is two-dimensional: pure love, then pure loneliness. There’s also a through line about how she lied to little Cameron, pretending to have been a movie star. It seems that this is supposed to be equivalent, somehow, to Cameron’s dishonesty, but it isn’t, so this material never really makes sense.

      Cameron is flat-out unattractive and the musical problematizes homosexuality in a way that feels antique. Why the hell is Cameron in such a flap about being queer? We hear that, when he came out to his parents, his mom cried and his dad laughed, but that doesn’t begin to justify his treatment of Grandma. Yes, coming out is still traumatic for lots of people—for real reasons. Cameron just feels like a whiner.

      And get this: Grandma knows all along that he’s a homo and she’s perfectly fine with it. Storytelling is about narrative tension; there’s no tension in this setup. It doesn’t make any sense, either: if Grandma knows Cameron is gay and he’s pushing her away, why doesn’t she just ask him about it? And, crucially, this setup allows for very little change: Grandma stays static and—I won’t give too much away—Cameron makes only a minor, sentimental move toward regret.

      Fortunately, the music itself is strong, full of varied textures, and, under the direction of pianist Chris Tsujiuchi, precisely delivered. Tsujiuchi and cellist Samuel Bisson rock out, appropriately enough, in “Googling Rock Hudson”, in which Cameron discovers, to his horror, that his favourite movie star is queer. And “When the World Changed”, the song in which Cameron comes out to Mom and Dad, is beautifully spare.

      Kempson, who plays Cameron, works his songs’ phrasing and dynamics in a clear, confident tenor. And Valerie Hawkins lends her warmth and liquid mezzo to Grandma.

      The music is great, but it needs a better story to serve.

      Comments

      1 Comments

      Briana Brown

      Jun 20, 2015 at 1:29am

      Just a correction - the pianist in the above photograph is Scott Christian. Thanks!

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