Review: FOR THE LACK OF LAURA, Shaw Theatre

Laura is bored. In rural Ireland long before industrialisation, there’s little for a woman to do except hang the washing on the line and marry the boy next door - which is, ultimately, what her friend, Maggie, does. But fate has a different prospect in store for our heroine. Cursed by a witch - it’s not absolutely clear why - she travels in time and space to meet five potential lovers who, like the three whom Portia meets in The Merchant of Venice, compete for her hand.

There’s a soupçon of the magical realism that underpins Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa in the atmosphere, a smidgeon of Riverdance in the ensemble numbers and a plenty of the kind of songs that have proved successful for Ireland at Eurovision over the years. There’s some curious video work (1880s Paris looking like 1980s Kowloon was very strange), but there’s also a couple of sweet romances and a happy ending to send us home smiling. It’s inoffensive family fare, if a little thin for a house of this capacity.

There’s always an issue in writing reviews of new musicals, especially when it’s a first time effort, as is the case for Kurt Rosenberg with this production. MT is so hard to get right that it’s tempting to view its shiny new products as a work-in-progress and give notes on how they can be improved. But this London residency comes after runs in Galway and Malvern - this is no preview - so what we see is a finished work, even if it’s easy to suggest changes. More of that later.

The strongest suit is the pleasing music, 26 songs, which inevitably become a little samey, but, at their best, they’re catchy folk-pop, a genre with many fans. They’re also sung well by a talented cast, with Jane Patterson and Emma Daly as the two friends the standouts, but there are no weak links. There’s some strong harmony work too, but we don’t hear enough of it, particularly as we’re hardly short of tunes! The band, with fiddles and pipes to the fore, is always listenable. The dancing is, well, let’s say less successful.

The key issue, and it’s almost a cliche to say so about a new musical, is the book. We never really get to know Laura, beyond the fact that she feels there’s a big world out there and she wants to explore it. The men she stumbles upon instantly fall for her the moment she pitches up in early 20th century Madrid or revolutionary Moscow (but there is no history or sense of place in the show apart from Margarita Belova’s eyecatching costumes) and the suitors are all cliches, nothing beyond their character flaws. Why should Laura want their love/lust? Why should they (who have far more options than a farmgirl in Mayo) fall for her? And why oh why does she fall for the sappy one who sounds like a would-be cult leader?

With each song a self-contained event, there’s little chance to establish narrative drive and producer/director, Luke Morgan, never gets to grips with a vast stage, curiously not made more manageable by curtains or scenery. One clunky blackout and set change after another sap the energy from the show, Laura continually wandering on to the stage as if she left a scarf behind. At the Arcola or Southwark Playhouse, it might just be made to work, but there’s no chance in this venue.

It’s instructive that the subplot - as Maggie finds love unexpectedly in the arms of Parick (Brian May) - is much more engaging than Laura’s trysts with her five would-be lovers. Self-contained and benefitting from much looser, funnier delivery, the couple's courtship is a lot of fun - I really wanted to know how things worked out for them.

At the other end of the scale, Mo Lombardo looks like she has been asked to play the witch Gwendolethe as “Rhiannon-period” Stevie Nicks, but in the style of a pantomime villain. It’s as bad as it sounds, despite Lombardo’s excellent vocals and fully committed performance.

Of course, there are many musicals with unlikely books in which people fall in love on a whim and characterisation is wafer-thin, but they are not also hamstrung by those repeated blackouts, stagehands coming on with props in gthe gloom and yet another character whom we haven’t seen for 20 minutes to recall, as he starts singing. Fix the venue and the pacing, flesh out characters and motivation and get a little more variety into the music and there’s something that might work - but I’m afraid it’s not working now.

So, despite my best efforts not to give feedback and the work of a wonderful young cast, the review has turned out like a bit of a report card. Perhaps that’s always going to be the case when a new musical is staged - For the Lack of Laura is not the first, and it certainly won’t be the last, so be so evaluated.

For The Lack Of Laura at the Shaw Theatre until 2 August