Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ROBOCOP The Musical, Cousins in Law Productions. Photo supplied.
Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ROBOCOP: The Musical (Stage 11, Varscona Theatre
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
Here’s weird. If Rodgers and Hammerstein were such musical theatre big shots, with clout, how come “their most ambitious show ever” never made it to opening night? Till now.
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When a cop in a crime-ridden city (Andrew Boyd, who has startlingly big, lustrous musical theatre pipes) bursts onto the stage, and into song, stealing Curly’s euphoric anthem — “Oh what a fine Detroit morning, Oh what a great Detroit day!” — you know you’re in the presence of the showbiz premise you never knew you were waiting for.
It is the mind-cracking inspiration of Cousins-In-Law Productions (whose last outing, SPEED: a 1940s radio drama was a Sterling winner this year) to hook up musical theatre royalty, purveyors of a sacred canon of indelible melodies, memorable characters, lush orchestrations, with the 1987 cyberpunk action film.
And in the course of this lunatic first (and only) date, co-created by Boyd and director Lauren Boyd), you’ll hear songs from nearly every corner of the R&H archive, The Sound of Music, South Pacifc, Oklahoma! … with lyrics re-worked for the occasion. There is no way this should be a fit, which is the whole Fringe-y point of it. But, somehow, amusingly, it does, more than you’d predict. Police HQ is a convent, the cops are nuns, and Murphy, the Maria of the piece till he’s, like, brutally murdered (“so long, farewell…”) reports to Chief Mother Superior.
The ingenious team of Boyd and Boyd even make room for some contemporary satire. “How do you solve a problem like the crime rate?” (work with me here, dear reader; imagine the tune). Law enforcement has been handed over to a big global corporation. Where could that ever happen?
There’s even a dream ballet, for heaven’s sake, and since Jason Hardwick is part of the 11-actor cast of strong singers and dancers that Lauren Boyd sets in motion, I’m assuming he did the choreography, full of DeMille allusions.
You know the musical references with altered lyrics — even if you don’t think you do, and hate musicals. And for musical theatre junkies this is comedy cocaine. In fact there’s a big production number ode to that elixir, from a drug gang in sailor get-up: “There is nothing like cocaine…” pilfered from the South Pacific stash.
Bonkers, and as the red velvet Varscona curtains open, it’s on a production scale rarely found at the Fringe. As the song, with its new lyrics, goes, “everythin’s up to date in Detroit city; we’ll take about as much as we can get.”