Ruth Agnew reviews Fairystories, presented by Enchanting Productions at The Piano: Centre for Music and the Arts, Wednesday 10 April, 2024.
Enchanting Productions has delighted audiences with prior performances including their successful company debut of Secret Garden and the impressive season of the challenging Sondheim classic, A Little Night Music. Their latest offering again boasts an impressive cast including some of the city’s finest musical theatre stars, but sadly Fairystories lacks the magic and charm promised.
This is the world premiere of Paul Graham Brown’s musical. In addition to composing and writing Fairystories, Brown is musical director/ supervisor, and the pianist for the season. The music was the highlight of the show; bright, light melodies captured the era and mood well, and offered some lovely moments for the talented singers onstage.
Fairystories takes on the famous 1920s story of one of the greatest hoaxes ever played on an established academic and author by a couple of children with art supplies and hat pins, framed in a fictional subplot involving a romance between neighbours. Arthur Conan Doyle championed a pair of country cousins who claimed to have taken photographs capturing them interacting with fairies, which were later revealed to be cut out drawings held in place with hat pins. In this adaptation young cousins Elsie and Frances become neighbours Polly and Henry, while Arthur Conan Doyle retains his name – and his reputation for believing in all things Supernatural.
Polly is a spoilt brat unhappy about being uprooted from a comfortable life in South Africa to live in the hellish chaos of a cosy English cottage with her domestically-challenged mother Elsie (Ali Harper). It is unclear how old Polly is meant to be, as she stamps her feet like a toddler one scene and coquettishly manipulates Henry the next, but the poorly written part is not the fault of the actor. Sophie Landis has already demonstrated her talent for tantruming in A Secret Garden, as well as her formidable voice. Few teenagers would be able to hold their own singing onstage with Roy Snow and Ali Harper, but Landis is in her element in such illustrious company.
The romantic subplot between Elsie the widowed neighbour Edward (Roy Snow, swoon-worthy as ever) is entirely a creation of the playwright, and while Snow and Harper are both ideal romantic leads, their love story is decidedly odd. There is a particularly strange interaction early in their relationship when Harper’s character is interrupted scrubbing the kitchen floor in her undergarments. The effort required to shoehorn in some sauciness is misplaced, and the inclusion of the children in the moment is troubling. Similarly, the bickering over whether beating a child about the head is an appropriate form of discipline is jarring.
The worst clangers in the script are the blatantly misogynistic (Henry: “Girls; that you want to beat back with a big stick!”) and racist (Polly: “I didn’t know they had white servants in Yorkshire!”). Given this is a new work, it defies understanding that a playwright would choose to include such offensive phrases without any dramatic justification.
The script continues to prevent my appreciation of anything else happening onstage. Snow’s character speaks in streams of hackneyed sayings and proverbs, with attempts at humour that come across as nasty criticisms: “a tiresome little trait that a man could come to hate”.
There are still enjoyable aspects of Fairystories. The music is genuinely lovely, and the musicians glimmering behind a leafy curtain is magical. It is a shame the lyrics aren’t on a par with the composition: lines like “Litle changes, I feel them in the water, in the plumbing, in my brush, in my hair”, fail to evoke the same feeling. Still, this reimagining of a magical moment in time does offer alternative ways of viewing the famous fairy hoax, in a sympathetic manner.
Enchanting Productions has proven their worth in their previous work, and in the bright moments of delightful musical storytelling in Fairystories. Sadly, the flawed script let down the talented cast, and made Fairystories a disappointing experience for me. I look forward to their upcoming youth production of Oliver.
Fairystories ran from 10-13 April, 2024.
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