As a reviewer, if you’re lucky, you get a tingle down the spine - rarely, but you know it when you feel it. It’s the sensation of seeing theatre anew, not just something good or something innovative, but something you just haven’t seen before at all.
Then, you line up the pieces and, though they still don’t fit snugly into the expected picture on the jigsaw puzzle box, you find comparators, parallels, signposts to help navigate this unfamiliar landscape. Often that tempers your initial reaction, the nuts and bolts reveal themselves and you fit it the production into a matrix of shows past and present. But I can find only two genuine comparisons for Theo Jamieson’s and Adam Lenson’s new musical, Flyby.
Richard Russell’s story is not well known, but If you have tears, prepare to shed them now. I could see the everyman ground crew technician who stole an airliner in Daniel Defoe, the lost boy lost in space. Closer to the format, it’s ten years since I saw Adam Guettel’s unforgettable Floyd Collins, its swirling music that seemed unanchored at times, gorgeously symphonic, as much soundscape as song. Both moved me - and so did Flyby.
We start with the chorus (Rupert Young, Gina Beck and Simbi Akande - and, with talent like that, you’re straight away wondering about how good the principals will be!). They explain that the European Space Commission has lost two assets in deep space - a small module and the astronaut who appears to have simply launched off with it from the mother ship. He passed the multiple psych assessments to get the gig and he showed no problems on the mission. But he had cleared away his stuff and that suggested some element of premeditation. But why?
The show then takes us back in time and we see, through the history of his relationship with the mercurial Emily, what led him to such an extreme act.
That Stuart Thompson (pictured above with Poppy Gilbert) is even visible in the scenes that follow is a testament to the quality of his acting and his sweetest of tenor voices. Because it’s impossible not to watch the whirling dervish that is Poppy Gilbert as Emily, a performance of such energy, complexity and hard-edged ballsiness that I doubt I’ll see it matched this year. She is so compelling, it's possible to overlook just how gloriously affecting is her singing.
She just about holds Emily the right side of caricature, something to which I can attest as I have known women like this, exhausting, exciting and full of fatal attraction. The daughter of a film director, she is not short of nepo baby entitlement in her job as a line producer on award-winning documentaries, but she delivers in a competitive field. She even has time for a bit of Trumpian transference, vociferously accusing a young assistant of exactly her own privilege - the lady protesting too much. She is also damaged by her parents’ divorce and her exposure to the crazy world of moviemaking at a tender age. If you’re thinking “Liza Minnelli”, so was I.
Thompson’s Daniel is quieter, more considered in his reactions, but in a bravura song supported by Lenson’s video design (which is worth the ticket price on its own) we learn of the sheer volume of everyday cruelties that weigh him down, the equivalent of a lifetime of microaggressions that eventually, inevitably, reach a tipping point because Emily is not the kind of girl given to holding back.
Both sing beautifully, with body mics, but so close up that we feel every emotional beat in the melodies as they twist and turn. To arrange the music for keys and strings only is a masterstroke, wonderfully delivered by Ben Kubiak’s band, placed above the action barely visible.
Lyrics, with a hint of Sondheim’s unabashed cleverness, complement the often plaintive strings and that musical theatre magic, so rare in a new show, happens. Words, music and performance reinforce each other and the emotional punch hits you in the solar plexus. In that, the show is as much located in opera as it is in MT, but the best musicals often suggest that related genre.
And, just in case I have left you in any doubt, Flyby is one of the best new British musicals I’ve seen in years, bold in conception and execution and dazzlingly performed. Don’t miss it!
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