Rapunzel’s Last Midnight is an ambitious attempt to combine modern-day tragicomedy, old-fashioned fantasy and musical theatre. A shambolic, scruffy coterie of singers and musicians congregate at Ruby’s cafe, most of them nursing bruised hearts. Into their midst wanders an older woman with a name out of a fairy tale, and a penchant for ripping the petals off roses. What happens next is pretty spectacularly unlikely, but enlivened by some fine ensemble music-making.
The multi-talented company move between instruments with aplomb, and find a purpose and cohesion in their collective music that all too often eludes them elsewhere in the play. Joe Evans’s score skilfully reveals the troubles and dreams of the lonely souls who bring their woes to the piano.
Meanwhile the story jolts alarmingly between realism and allegory, with disconcerting shifts of tone and style that wrong-foot some of the cast into emoting and portending madly. The best moments are the most intimate, moments when these relentlessly self-dramatising characters stop posturing and start behaving like real people.
These passages of music and silence, late night ramblings and private jokes, are the most successful parts of the evening. Johanna Stanton makes more of a few speechless moments by the piano than she does of the rest of her lines put together. Nic Van Gelder is quietly impressive as her tongue-tied admirer, hiding his true feelings behind the keyboard. And Michael Chadwick is a low-key delight as a drunken, rueful clown, forlornly and hopefully trying to hold the show together.
Somewhere in all this, there’s a neat, touching, melancholy little musical, about shifting from the black notes to the white, and believing in the possibility of happy endings, despite experience. Rapunzel’s Last Midnight, as it stands, ain’t quite it. But sometimes that other show shines through an evening of too many words, too many tangled stories and too little faith in a truly evocative score.
The story of rapunzel could certainly use a new touch to it. It is one of the classic fairy tales that has for the most part remained unchanged over the years, it seems only recently that people are starting to take notice of it.