Adriane Daff, Jeffrey Jay Fowler, Gita Bezard and Pete Townsend
REVIEW: Elephents | The Last Great Hunt and The Blue Room
No, Elephents is not a musical; it’s a soap opera with song.
But it turns out that he wasn’t really writing a musical after all. According to the show’s description, Elephents is a “surreal soap opera with songs where people find the power to sing all the things they desperately want to say”. Well, okay. So, what? A play with songs isn’t always a musical. Case in point, last year’s final Black Swan production, Midsummer (A Play With Songs). That could hardly be classified as a musical, but there were songs, however superfluous they might have been.In an interview I did with writer Jeffrey Jay Fowler (JJF) and Georgia King earlier this year about their Fringe show Second Hands, Fowler mentioned to me that his next project was going to be a musical. A musical?! I was both excited and trepidatious to see what JJF would do with the genre. He didn’t strike me as your typical musical theatre person — not even once during our conversation did he break out in song.
But it turns out that he wasn’t really writing a musical after all. According to the show’s description, Elephents is a “surreal soap opera with songs where people find the power to sing all the things they desperately want to say”. Well, okay. So, what? A play with songs isn’t always a musical. Case in point, last year’s final Black Swan production, Midsummer (A Play With Songs). That could hardly be classified as a musical, but there were songs, however superfluous they might have been.