Roddy Doyle’s the Commitments: A New Musical by Roddy Doyle, and: Teenage Kicks: A Punk Musical by Colin Bateman (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Roddy Doyle’s the Commitments: A New Musicalby Roddy Doyle, and: Teenage Kicks: A Punk Musicalby Colin Bateman Mary Jo Lodge RODDY DOYLE’S THE COMMITMENTS: A NEW MUSICAL. Book by Roddy Doyle. Directed by Jamie Lloyd. Choreographed by Ann Lee. Palace Theatre, London. 3November 2013. TEENAGE KICKS: A PUNK MUSICAL. Written by Colin Bateman. Directed by Des Kennedy. Choreographed by Jennifer Rooney. Co-produced by the Millennium Forum and the Nerve Centre. Millennium Forum, Derry, Northern Ireland. 6November 2013. In the autumn of 2013, two new stage musicals that explored the intersections of Irish identity in the 1980s with popular music, The Commitmentsand Teenage Kicks, premiered in the UK. Both experimented with the ways in which popular music forms rarely seen on the musical theatre stage—soul and punk—can be modified for dramatic performance. While the adaptation of popular music for the stage is as old as the art form of musical theatre, it is sometimes a tricky business, particularly when the adapted, nondramatic music is used to advance the plot, as it was in one of these new shows. The much higher profile of the two shows was the stage musical version of The Commitments, based on the popular 1987 novel by Irish writer Roddy Doyle, who also co-wrote the screenplay for the successful 1991 film of the same name and serves as book writer for the stage musical. The Commitmentsmusical, directed by Jamie Lloyd, opened on the West End in London on 8 October 2013 and featured the same catalog of soul music made famous in the film. I attended the production on Sunday, 3 November, and while there were no fewer than four understudies appearing that night, including Thomas Snowdon in the role of Jimmy (normally performed by Denis Grindel) and Ian McIntosh, who played the demanding role of Deco every Sunday evening (played otherwise by Killian Donnelly), it was an enjoyably entertaining evening, although it often felt more like a musical revue than a book musical. The Commitmentsmusical follows the same plot as the previous film and book, exploring the lives of impoverished, working-class, young white men and a few white women from the rough northside of Dublin. It centers on Dubliner Jimmy Rabbitte’s formation of a band he dubs “The Commitments,” one that will exclusively play American soul music, typically associated with African American musicians, even though the entire band is white. The musical is not especially plot heavy and the story is told almost exclusively in the brief book scenes rather than through its adapted soul music. As in the film and book, The Commitments achieve a small degree of success in Dublin, much of which is depicted in a single concert that makes up the bulk of act 2, but their internal struggles with personality conflicts, romantic entanglements, and outsized egos eventually overwhelm the band. The show is primarily a musical celebration that includes an extended character study, particularly of driven band-manager Jimmy, as well as of Deco, the arrogant and difficult lead singer, and Joey “The Lips” Fagan, the philandering veteran musician who joins the young band. Unlike The Commitments, the other, smaller scale new UK musical, Teenage Kicks, premiered in Derry, Northern Ireland, on 1 November 2013 and was billed a “punk musical.” Teenage Kickswas written by Irish novelist and television writer Colin Bateman and featured punk music from the 1980s, particularly songs drawn from the catalogs of English band The Stranglers and Northern Irish bands Stiff Little Fingers and The Undertones. It was created as part of the inaugural yearlong UK City of Culture celebration, which was held in Derry in 2013. During its first week I attended the show in Derry, and while the production lacked the big-budget punch of The Commitments, the talented cast offered strong performances, in spite of occasional script problems. Teenage Kicks, which attempted to use its adapted punk music to advance and develop its plot, is set in both Derry, Northern Ireland, and then Iowa, in America, in 1981. The Troubles—as the conflict in Northern Ireland between the Loyalists, who were mostly Protestant, and the Republicans...