Thelma & Louise
Thelma & Louise – A New Musical is a success, I suppose, if your idea of success is a fertiliser bomb: it flies off in a dozen random directions and leaves carnage in its wake.
By any other measure, this experiment is a mediocre failure.
Let’s agree on one thing first: none of the blame lands on Rachel Tucker (Louise) and Amy Lennox (Thelma). Unflappable, funny and utterly natural, they are the best thing here by a country mile.
Lennox fizzes as a ditzy, Bambi-eyed Thelma, all impulse and giggles, whose sexual awakening unlocks a flair for stylish hold-ups. “If done right, armed robbery don’t have to be totally unpleasant,” she chirps. The line comes straight from the film, and it gives the night its funniest and truest moment, landing as cleanly on stage as it ever did on screen.
“I guess I went a little crazy, huh?”
Then the production starts to unravel, the moment you ask what the rest of the cast brings to the party beyond cardboard cut-outs of the movie’s characters.
At times it feels like an overblown Edinburgh show.
My best guess at a fix? Dump Trip Cullman’s direction. Perched above the wide Young Vic stage, the band is tight and working overtime, but the static staging below leaves the story stranded.
As if that weren’t irritating enough, the cast trudge through pointless choreography and tableaux, playing scenes to each other from 30 feet across the auditorium. Natasha Chivers’ lighting streaks neon round the stage to suggest the open highway, and Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber’s movement work adds a restless unease. Neither can rescue a show this determined to be miserable. By a distance, it’s one of the most joyless movie musicals ever contrived.
Consider the plot: an abusive marriage, attempted rape, murder and a double suicide. Where is the fun? Alas, this is a lecture thinly disguised as a musical. Spare me the misandry and the finger-wagging at the patriarchy. The dangers these women face feel clumsy and contrived.
And the noise, the noise. What a racket. Neko Case’s country-rock songs all sound the same, and not one made me want to hear it again.
Still, for all its energetic self-sabotage, you hold out hope that Jordan Luke Gage or Trevor Dion Nicholas might transform it with something of substance, like irony, camp or some larger-than-life aplomb.
Neither quite does. Nicholas is quietly dignified as the detective on the fugitives’ trail, though his domestic backstory stalls the pace. Gage makes the most of the slender role of JD, the drifter who launched a young Brad Pitt.
The film’s finale is one of Hollywood’s most epic. Here, the abrupt ending comes as a welcome relief. One of the movie’s most memorable lines sums up my feelings: “You get what you settle for.”