Review: 35MM: A MUSICAL EXHIBITION, Phoenix Arts Club

“Who cares what happened after?” This is the question posed by song cycle 35MM, which takes its structure from a series of photographs, each projected onto the back wall, and giving us a musical insight into a single moment, where nothing beforehand or afterwards matters – a breakup, the tender beginnings of romance, or on one occasion a parent wrangling their Satanic baby.

One can see the logic behind choosing Phoenix Arts Club as the venue for this production, the first in the UK since Adam Lenson’s version at The Other Palace in 2017. The cavernous cabaret space beneath The Phoenix Theatre sometimes feels more like an independent art gallery than a performance space, so it’s well suited to a small scale show that’s heavily reliant on visuals.

However, the musical simultaneously feels too sonically ambitious for so small a space. The inventive pop-rock score sometimes feels overwhelming with the band squashed in next to the cast, and clever lyrics are lost amidst the cacophony both sonic and visual. The cast of five do well with challenging material, though – Six’s Jaina Brock-Patel lends a spunky charm to a woman in love with a vampire, and Joseph Riley’s peppy boyband vocals are plaintive when singing about an imperfect relationship.

Since we’re in such a small space, the pictures projected behind the stage are inevitably where the audience’s eye is drawn, and they really must tell a thousand words. Among the deluge of current shows relying on some form of projection technology, this directorial choice is justifiable, but the real issue is the images themselves. While Ryan Scott Oliver’s music conveys powerful and varied mini-narratives, the photographs that supposedly inspired the songs (by Oliver’s husband, the dance and theatre photographer Matthew Murphy) often feel bland and generic, like stock photos with some heavy saturation effects applied. Frequent graphic effects superimposed on the images don’t help with the lack of subtlety on display.

The score is also not without its issues, ricocheting from pop to folk and briefly to (possibly parodic) Christian rock. Oliver has a knack for writing about make-or-break moments in relationships – “The Party Goes With You”, a soft-rock ballad about a woman feeling isolated from a wealthy husband, is a standout – but there isn’t quite enough thematic coherence to extract a wider message from the score as a whole, or enough meat in the individual songs to make a disconnected vignette structure work.

There are thus weaknesses both on the “musical” and the “exhibition” side of things, and the production also sometimes fails to integrate the two. Some weaker songs and photographs appear awkwardly tacked on to one another, and director Dean Johnson’s choices don’t do much to help with this – the hilarious closing number about a murderous prom queen will perhaps be remembered by for the Chicago-esque choreography than the teen mugshots fading into the background.

35MM is certainly inventive in terms of what a musical can look and sound like, and with some sonic adjustments it could feel very emotionally intimate in this venue. It’s an imperfect score and overall concept, but an interesting look at a slice of overlooked musical theatre innovation.

35MM: A Musical Exhibition plays at the Phoenix Arts Club until 8 July