I left Sing Street, the new musical from Enda Walsh and John Carney at New York Theatre Workshop, with a song on my lips. Unfortunately, that song was Falling Slowly, from Walsh and Carney’s previous musical, Once. Enjoyable, admirable and starring a superabundance of talented actor-musicians, many of them still in their teens, Sing Street is nevertheless so slim it seems to disappear before the last note has sounded.
Adapted by Walsh from Carney’s 2016 film and directed by Rebecca Taichman, the show is set in a no-hope 1980s Dublin. Sixteen-year-old Conor (Brenock O’Connor, sweet and charismatic) finds himself removed from his fee-paying school and enrolled at a free all-boys academy run by the Christian Brothers. When Conor meets a girl, Zara Devlin’s poised Raphina, he asks her to star in a music video for his band. Trouble is, he doesn’t have a band. With the help of Darren, a new school friend, he instantly acquires one. He acquires Raphina nearly as easily.
Sing Street exists on the rickety border between grim realism and fairytale. Some of the conflicts seem real enough – the recession, Conor’s parents’ unhappiness, the abusive family lives of several of his friends, the almost offhand bullying by the head of school – but they’re resolved or abandoned so swiftly that they feel less like obstacles and more like minor annoyances. Conor writes without anxiety or pause; his band plays each number perfectly from the first count-off. The blighted life of Conor’s brother, Brendan (Gus Halper, who is excellent), weighted down with depression and agoraphobia is compelling, but this isn’t his story.
Walsh likes stories. Plot? Not so much. In adhering closely to the film script, already insubstantial and more of a mood piece than a yarn, the narrative keeps eluding him and most of the characters remain undeveloped. Besides Eamon (Sam Poon), Conor’s rabbit-loving co-songwriter, I couldn’t tell you who Conor’s other bandmates are. (One is tall? One has a moustache?) Once, which subsequently transferred to Broadway, was not exactly rich in incident either, but it had a stronger sense of character, a heftier, more emotive score and, under John Tiffany’s direction, which seemed to relocate the action to a pub lock-in, a surer sense of place.
Here the songs, by Carney and Gary Clark, are cheerful new wave, post-punk pastiche (you can pick out bits of the Clash and the Cure), intercut with 80s hits and near hits such as Duran Duran’s Rio and Haircut 100’s Love Plus One. The songs, as played by the cast and animated by the choreographer Sonya Tayeh’s vernacular movement, are pleasurable, but mostly they just hang there, doing little to define character or to urge the story onward. They set the mood, sure, like the lovely opening number, in which Conor listens to Depeche Mode’s Just Can’t Get Enough on a Walkman, then plays along in private ecstasy, but the mood only needs so much help.
Taichman directs with immense empathy, but her physical production feels similarly static. She works mostly without set or props, save for a table and some chairs. The background, by the set and costume designer Bob Crowley, is an image of the Irish Sea, initially interesting as a metaphor and then increasingly empty. In a show in which what little plot there is turns on the recording of videos, it seems strange never to project any of the band’s efforts.
This doesn’t mean Sing Street should pack away its electric guitars. It has a gifted cast, a kind heart and some very cool keyboard action. If it could synthesize all that with a more vital story, who could get enough?
