Review: The Broadway-bound '42 Balloons' is a musical lifted by songs you've heard before
The introverted Walter was not some TikTok influencer (he took no pictures and did not inhabit any such gestalt), but an eccentric man who simply wanted to fulfill his lifelong dream of being a pilot.
For those who have not seen other material influenced by Walters' flight (the movie 'Up' being just one example), the veracity of the story gets pointed out at the top of '42 Balloons' by an eight-person ensemble, a self-aware Greek chorus that knows it is in a musical. 'This actually happened, you can look it up after the show,' they sing. 'And you can tell your friends about it and they can say, 'That's pretty crazy, why did you go and see a musical about balloons and what makes a man try to fly in a lawn chair?''
That's a good question on many levels, especially since Walters (played by Charlie McCullagh) persuaded his wife, Carol (Evelyn Hoskins, in a dominant performance), and his best pal, Ron (Akron Watson), to fund and back his quixotic quest, despite its obvious risks to life and limb. But it's also a clever bit of self-protection from the exceedingly smart Godfrey, a newcomer who has written an enjoyable and engaging new musical that strives to see Walters as an everyman with a weird dream — not so different, of course, from the dreams people describe in Tony Award acceptance speeches. His fast-moving, sung-through show (Godfrey penned the whole shooting match) is a quizzical, chirpy, mid-sized musical written for a cast of 12, with an undeniably charming and very British insouciance.
American eccentrics like Walters long have provided material for satirists across the pond. But the difference between '42 Balloons' and, say, 'Jerry Springer — The Opera' is that this one has an emotional openness at its core. Godfrey walks a careful line between making musical hay with the strangeness of Walters' 'Candide'-like quest and admiring the guy's chutzpah and his determination to find his grail, as they say in 'Spamalot.' Many of his lyrics are written in narrative rather than dramatic form, allowing his characters to comment on their own actions and motivations ('Suddenly Larry felt a flash in his mind,' Larry sings at one point, and Carol warbles 'Carol didn't really expect this').
But then Godfrey also knows how to write sharp, funny lyrics. When Carol's mom, Margaret (the caustic Lisa Howard) makes her first entrance, her song starts with, 'When your daughter marries a loser …' It's funny, because it reflects back exactly what the audience is thinking.
The score is, well, strangely familiar.
There's a number that recalls 'Light My Candle' from 'Rent.' Another that sounds like 'Everything's Alright' from 'Jesus Christ Superstar.' A third shot me right into the middle of Justin Paul and Benj Pasek's 'Dear Evan Hansen.' A fourth felt like 'Come From Away.' And a fifth catchy hook, penned for Carol and beautifully sung by the fabulous Hoskins, kept me awake half the night trying to remember in which show I had heard that particular musical phrase before.
You can hear the strong influence of Tim Minchin, who wrote the score for 'Matilda,' as well as other English composers from John Barry to Andrew Lloyd Webber to Willy Russell to Elton John to the Australian songwriter John Farrar, who wrote 'Xanadu,' another show you keep hearing. There's a 'Hamilton'-like rap and, unsurprisingly, some harmonics not so different from 'Six.' At other moments in the orchestrations, you feel like you are listening to ABBA or Electric Light Orchestra or 10cc or the show 'Rock of Ages.'
I recount all that not necessarily as pejorative or to say that '42 Balloons' is like a musical Wikipedia (although, come to think of it …). Broadway musicals are an incremental art form and shows quote other scores all the time, and that above list is long enough to suggest intentionality and provide contrasts. But it is especially noticeable here and is part of what makes Godfrey's score Godfrey's score. There's a baked-in familiarity to everything you hear and, while purists will likely demur, I can see regular audiences latching onto its retro, gently satirical comforts. It's easy on the ears and it also knows that it's easy on the ears and has fun making fun of the fact that it's easy on the ears.
The musical '42 Balloons' at Chicago Shakes is a producer's bet on the unknownBy Act 2, I'd decided this was the most jukebox-like musical that was not a jukebox musical I had ever heard. That might well be its secret to success: giving an audience original songs that they will feel like they have enjoyed before. That's actually far from easy to pull off and, despite the undeniably derivative nature of this theatrical experience, I find myself wanting to go back and hear it again.
Hoskins, a powerhouse British talent, takes the most advantage of the score's many opportunities. A performer with integrity, McCullagh is laudably committed to honoring his troubled and introverted character, but he still needs to fully find his way to the emotional center of the show. That's the show's biggest issue right now.
There's other work to be done, beginning with a song or two that quote absolutely nothing, although this piece already has been staged in Manchester in the U.K. and it's performed at a very capable level under director Ellie Coote, another talented newcomer. There's a hole in Act 1 where Larry needs a song to better explain, like, why he wants to fly in a lawnchair. The Act 2 swirl where post-flight Larry becomes a media curiosity feels underdeveloped. And the show still has to figure out how to logically negotiate both the sadness of the end of this story and its inspirational properties, as musicals always demand. It's all rushed right now. And, frankly, if it says '42 Balloons' on the marquee, they need to be in the show, not the lobby; the lawnchair alone looks mighty lonely.
Godfrey introduces an original character to this story, called The Kid, a bystander who finds himself inspired in his own life by Walter's acts. That's a great device and worth further developing, especially since the fine young performer, Minju Michelle Lee, makes you feel what you need to feel. Walking out the door, I found myself thinking about the ubiquitousness of casual American cruelty, present in the 1980s and, of course, today. Plenty of folks right now would like to ascend into the air and get away. If Godfrey can have fun tap into that, Walters will seem like the most logical person in the country.
Review: '42 Balloons' (3 stars)
When: Through June 29
Where: The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier, 800 E. Grand Ave.
Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes
Tickets: $71-$132 at 312-595-5600 and chicagoshakes.com
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Chicago Tribune
44 minutes ago
- Chicago Tribune
Column: The Stratford Festival of theater rediscovers a beating Canadian heart
STRATFORD, ONTARIO — Settling in my seat for 'Annie' at the Stratford Festival of Canada, I awaited with perennial pleasure the overture's trumpet solo for 'Tomorrow,' followed by the chirpy sounds of 'It's the Hard-Knock Life,' a masterful little combo that first argues for optimism at all times before empathizing with our daily grinds. But it didn't happen. Instead, the 1,800 people inside the sold-out Festival Theatre here rose to their feet and sang the music of Calixa Lavallée, not Charles Strouse: 'O Canada, Our Home and Native Land.' The moment was striking because in some 30 years of attending Canada's most prominent theater festival every summer, I'd never heard the Canadian national anthem sung at a regular performance of a show. The Stratford Festival, founded by a British man, dedicated to a British playwright and popular with Chicagoans and other Americans for decades, had always existed within a kind of multinational, English-language detente. This year, surely as a reaction to President Donald Trump's rhetorical campaign to render Canada the 51st state, it just felt a whole lot more Canadian. At the Avon Theatre, during the intermission for that most Canadian of stories, 'Anne of Green Gables,' my eyes fell on the ice cream case, as they are wont to do. The outside of the fridge said Breyers. But inside was a local Ontario brand, McFadden's. Delicious. All that said, Americans, the festival says, have been returning to Stratford this year: U.S. visitation is up by 4% year-over-year. There is also something of a local campaign in town to make them feel especially welcome. At Revel, a local coffee house and distinguished pastry purveyor, a sign on the counter asks American visitors to identify themselves. If they do, they are treated to a free coffee beverage, courtesy not of the cafe but of a local benefactor who prefers to just go by Stuart and who gets billed daily, and who wants Americans to feel welcome to the point of funding their cappuccinos. He's the local version of Daddy Warbucks, whose crew likes to sing about how Annie 'put sweet dreams upon our menu.' As indeed she does. The year's Canadian vibe, a very lively and ebulliently choreographed 'Annie' aside, extends to most of the shows I saw here. The big hit this year is 'Anne of Green Gables,' a beloved Canadian coming-of-age story by Lucy Maud Montgomery about another outspoken redheaded orphan, this one a denizen not of N.Y.C. but of Canada's Prince Edward Island. As played by Caroline Toal, Anne 'with an e' captures her audience almost the moment she walks out on stage. A pre-existing relationship and familiarity surely helped, although that can be a double-edged sword. I watched young Canadian girls and women all around me sizing up the ebullient but vulnerable Toal in a matter of seconds and deciding she will do very, very well. Indeed. Improbably, the spunky Toal is the star of the Stratford summer. The new adaptation, written and directed by Kat Sandler, first sets the story within an outer frame, a book club taking on Montgomery's novel, which is a conventional meta approach. It then makes the far bolder choice of abandoning the period setting halfway through and asking the question, 'What would Anne be like today?' The idea works strikingly well, partly because we've already experienced the heroine in her actual period, so it doesn't feel as much like an imposition as other modernizations but instead feels helpfully ruminative, a stand-in for what every contemporary fan of the book typically wonders as they read. 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But the aptly named 'Forgiveness' also explores how conscripted Canadian servicemen were treated by the Japanese forces, who subjected them to horrific camps of their own, thus in part explaining (in this play) the challenges Canadian veterans in supporting the subsequent interracial marriage of their own children. The piece, which is directed by Stafford Arima, is too subtle and sophisticated to claim equivalence, or to try and argue which was worse than the other. But the reality of most theater, of course is that the audience skews older, whatever efforts are made to the contrary, and the retirees who flock to genteel Stratford each summer are only one generation removed from those remembering World War II. 'Forgiveness' functions not as a reckoning but as a dramatic truth and reconciliation committee that takes its viewers by the hand and helps them move forward to a multi-cultural and unified nation together. 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That's always moving, especially when you have a deep well of an actor like Graham Abbey playing Leontes. But Shakespeare leaves Leontes and Hermione's son, Mamillius, dead. He died from distress at his mother's arrest and he usually just lingers at the end, unseen and unspoken. Not here. In this production, he arrives accompanied by an angel. Leontes thinks he has got him back, too. But no. Not all of our mistakes can be corrected, Cimolino first seems to be saying. But the exquisite moment then suggests that Mamillius can still forgive from immortality, and thus Leontes still can be forgiven. It's affirmative and deeply sad. I won't quickly forget the end of this summer telling of 'The Winter's Tale.' On this trip, that leaves me with director Robert Lepage's 'Macbeth,' a wacky production that imagines the Scottish play as a feud between coke-snorting bikers. Settings include a roadside motel, from a balcony wherein Lucy Peacock's all-in Lady M falls most theatrically, a gas station and a parking lot with outdoor grills, the flame-throwing lair of the twisted sisters. When Macbeth meets his pre-ordained fate, Birnam Wood arrives in the form of bikers riding what look like real bikes, all carrying little verdant trees on their handlebars. There's another rub too. Tom McCamus, who plays Macbeth, is a 70-year-old actor and a great veteran star of this festival, as is Peacock, a fine foil. That's a cool idea. Most of Shakespeare's characters shift in age according to which scene you are in. No reason not to push that envelope a bit with an actor of this skill and lucidity, Alas the concept, which uses the cinematically fused iconography familiar to we longtime fans of LaPage, doesn't really work because it doesn't establish enough gravitas among the biker gangs to really make you believe they are dealing with matters of honor and destiny; it is as if the characters are putting on the drama, which can work fine with many of the Bard's works, but not this one. Macbeth is meta all by itself. It does not need any frame for it work its horrors. Still, any festival of Canadian identity — even if I think that mostly is unconscious — has to deal with the Quebecois, the yang to the yin of rural Ontario, which isn't far removed from Minnesota nice. That only gets you so far with the Scottish play. Lepage always offers a little Francophone disruption wheresoever he roams, disruptingly, and 'Macbeth' never really works, anyway. Except on us poor suckers who fall prey to its curses.
New York Post
an hour ago
- New York Post
Prince Harry ‘desperate' to win back royal family with latest peace offering to King Charles: expert
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Tom's Guide
an hour ago
- Tom's Guide
Apple drops first trailer for new survival thriller — and it just became one of my most anticipated movies of the fall
Director Paul Greengrass certainly knows how to create an adrenaline-fueled thriller movie. The British filmmaker helmed three entries in the 'Jason Bourne' franchise alongside the acclaimed 'Captain Phillips,' and now he's back in the survival genre via Apple TV Plus. The director's new movie is called 'The Lost Bus' and it's set to arrive on Apple's streaming service later on October 3. It will also receive a limited theatrical release on September 19, which could indicate that Apple thinks it has an awards player on its hands. The survival drama is set during the 2018 Camp Fire, which is noted as being the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history. It stars Oscar winner Matthew McConaughey alongside 'Barbie' alumna America Ferrera, who's an Academy Award nominee. Between the two stars and the pedigree of the director behind the camera, 'The Lost Bus' is a pretty easy sell, and it's already one of my most anticipated streaming movies of the fall season. However, if you need more convincing, Apple just dropped the first official trailer. This preview introduces McConaughey's character and sets the stakes as he's tasked with driving a bus full of schoolchildren through a blazing inferno while also attempting to reunite with his own son. Meanwhile, America Ferrea plays the children's teacher who is also desperate to ensure the children in her care escape the fire unharmed. In short, the trailer looks extremely intense. The closing shot, which shows the bright yellow school bus speeding down a fire-licked road, the forest on either side ablaze, is particularly striking. Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. The two-minute trailer also hints at the movie's emotional pull as McConaughey's character reflects on being an absentee father and his desire to make amends for his previous parental failures. Alongside the trailer, Apple has released an official synopsis for the upcoming movie: 'From director Paul Greengrass and inspired by real events, 'The Lost Bus' is a white-knuckle ride through one of America's deadliest wildfires as a wayward school bus driver (Matthew McConaughey) and a dedicated school teacher (America Ferrera) battle to save 22 children from the terrifying inferno." It certainly sounds like a setup ripe for adrenaline-raising brushes with towering flames, and with Greengrass in the director's seat, viewers can expect a movie that gets increasingly intense across its runtime. The fact that it's set during a real-world natural disaster will only make its dramatic moments all the more powerful as real people faced this wildfire. Alongside McConaughey and Ferrea, 'The Lost Bus' also features Yul Vazquez, Ashlie Atkinson, Spencer Watson and Danny McCarthy. It's based on the novel "Paradise: One Town's Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire" by Lizzie Johnson, and written by Brad Ingelsby and Paul Greengrass. 'The Lost Bus' is set to start streaming on Apple TV Plus on October 3. In the meantime, if you need something gripping to watch to help pass the time, Netflix just added both seasons of a twist-filled sci-fi thriller series and it's managed a rare 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
