Randall David Cook

Director Taibi Magar successfully creates a warm environment for this show that asks its audience to confront the coldest of human realities and to do it together. In a world that currently often feels so divided, Night Side Songs leans into the great, final commonality.

This new take is a mixed bag, hilarious one moment and bafflingly uneven the next. As Madame Pernelle, Bianca Del Rio gets the ball rolling with a breathless and perfectly delivered extended monologue where she announces the numerous faults of everyone with whom she is sharing oxygen. Imperious and hilarious, Del Rio leaves all the other characters and the audience breathless in her wake. Then the grande Madame exits the stage, not to return until the last minutes of the play. She is missed, and make no mistake, she knows it, because her late return gets applause from the audience and gives the show a needed jolt of energy.

Director and choreographer Tim Jackson keeps all the entertaining city escapades zipping along, but even so the show stretches a bit too long, especially the second act, which still leaves a few questions hanging. More heft is needed to warrant the show’s two-hour running time. The desire for a bit more edge is cemented when, near the end of the show, Robin and Dougal sing a song titled ‘Dearly Beloved‘. Those words immediately brought to mind the start of the ecstatic ‘La Vie Bohème‘, the act-one closer from Rent, another musical that has an energetic number in a Lower East Side restaurant.

Kim ends Did You Eat? (밥 먹었니?) with the reminder that bad cycles and painful legacies can be thwarted and replaced with new, better ones. And though it’s easy to be cynical about such decrees, by allowing the world to hear the darkest parts of her life – and showing how she’s emerged on the other side triumphant – Kim gives the audience genuine reason to believe that change, and love, remain possible.