Jeanine Tesori, who wrote the scores for Caroline, Or Change and Fun Home, has an undeniable melodic gift. This earlier piece, dating from 1997 and with book and lyrics by Brian Crawley, confirms her musical skills but fails to make the same impact. Based on a short story by Doris Betts, it has echoes of Carson McCullers in its focus on a lonely individual’s search for love and acceptance, but suffers from an incongruity between style and subject.
The eponymous heroine, facially disfigured by a childhood accident, travels by Greyhound bus in 1964 from Spruce Pine, North Carolina, to Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her mission is to meet a TV evangelist who she hopes will heal her scar and, in the course of her journey, she bonds with a black US serviceman, Flick, who knows what it is like to be judged by appearances.
The stopovers in Nashville and Memphis give Tesori a chance to echo their musical styles and a couple of the songs, All to Pieces and Lay Down Your Head, lodge in the memory. But the message – that we need to banish commodified notions of beauty – is trite and it seems odd that the supposedly shrinking Violet is quite such a confident chanteuse.
Kaisa Hammarlund, recently Alison in Fun Home, sings impressively and it is not her fault if Violet’s wistful solitude doesn’t square with her role as the musical’s chief motor.
Nimbly staged in the round by Shuntaro Fujita, the production boasts good support from Jay Marsh as Flick and Kenneth Avery-Clark as the TV faith healer. But the nine-strong band is so overpowering that I missed at least a third of the lyrics, and once again I wondered why an intimate musical needs to be so relentlessly amplified.
At Charing Cross theatre, London, until 6 April.
