Review: IN CLAY at Broadway Rose

There aren't many full-length one-person musicals, which makes IN CLAY, at Broadway Rose, particularly intriguing even before you discover how exquisite it is. This fairly new musical by Jack Miles and Rebecca Simmonds excavates the true story of Marie-Berthe Cazin, a French painter and sculptor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, whose talent was, for a time at least, eclipsed by bigger personalities.

Broadway Rose regular Malia Tippets is phenomenal, shape-shifting seamlessly between the show's multiple characters. In addition to Marie-Berthe, she embodies the artist's friend and rival Henriette Tirman, husband Jean-Michel, and others, while never losing the emotional thread of Marie-Berthe's journey. Tippets navigates the physical and vocal demands (accents, mannerisms, entire inner lives), all while singing the lush, jazz-inflected music that wraps the production in atmospheric richness.

She also throws pottery live on stage, an impressive theatrical flourish that reinforces the central metaphor of shaping and reshaping one's artistic identity. Props designer Drew Dannhorn deserves particular kudos, as the physical objects are essential to the show's textured reality. Larry Larsen's scenic design conjures a Paris studio, while Carl Faber's lighting design sculpts mood and meaning into this intimate piece.

At approximately 90 minutes, IN CLAY is perfectly packaged to give Tippets room to inhabit Marie-Berthe's self-exploration: her struggle with self-doubt, her experience of being dismissed by the establishment, the suffocating pressure of living in the shadow of a more famous husband and friend.

This is a show for anyone drawn to stories about women artists reclaiming their narratives, but also for anyone hungry for a fantastic performance of new work. The production will leave you with the beauty and ache of a woman's journey to find her own voice – in clay, in art, in life.

IN CLAY runs through February 15. Details and tickets here.