This absurd musical by Michael John LaChiusa, which won a critics’ award off-Broadway in 2012, centres on Anna Edson Taylor, who went over Niagara Falls in a barrel in 1901 and miraculously survived. The writer-composer tries to stretch an impoverished 63-year-old woman’s desperate stunt into a parable of American exceptionalism but there isn’t enough of a story here, or a character.
Trudi Camilleri’s pugnacious Anna begins and ends as a monster of self-belief, unable or unwilling to tell anyone how it felt to hurtle into thin air and down into churning, rocky spume. The supporting characters are thin: the boozy manager, the long-suffering sister, and so on. LaChiusa’s score is sophisticated but uncatchy, and his lyrics contain some painfully strained rhymes.
The show includes lots of period detail — President William McKinley was shot weeks before Anna’s act, and LaChiusa imagines her on the lecture circuit with Prohibitionist Carrie Nation — which probably meant more to American audiences.
Dom O’Hanlon’s production is mostly well-sung and decently acted, and has an intricate, magic-box design by Tara Usher. But after a repetitive couple of hours the show spirals off into a mad, extended, quasi-religious denouement. The final number is so laughably pretentious it had me biting my cheeks.
Until Oct 5 (08444 930650, charingcrosstheatre.co.uk).
