Sing Street
This sparky indie musical about a lonely Irish schoolboy who forms a band to escape a drab ’80s Dublin adolescence is a charming affair that reunites the architects of offbeat musical smash Once, as playwright Enda Walsh again adapts a movie by Irish filmmaker John Carney.
My gut instinct is that Rebecca Taichman’s production is a bit too all over the shop to really take off in the way Once did, but it’s an enjoyably lo-fi clutter, a show that seesaws between kitchen-sink bleakness and joyfully preposterous singing sequences with total earnestness.
It’s 1985 and Conor’s family are down on their luck: their comfortable middle-class lives have been squeezed and constricted by the depression gripping Ireland, which has left his architect dad with no work. Conor’s fee-paying private school has to go; he’s instead sent to strict, priest-run local school Synge Street.
He’s not exactly delighted by this. But after spying an enigmatic girl – Grace Collender’s Raphina – in a phone booth outside the school, Conor blurts out that he’s in a band in an effort to impress her. Cue a frantic scrabble to form one. And whaddayaknow: advised by his agoraphobic music geek older brother Brendan (Adam Hunter), Conor soon discovers he’s a pretty damn good songwriter.
Taken too literally, Sing Street defies sense. Conor’s titular band seems to be effortlessly polished straight away and yet they never appear to gig or earn money, they just make little low-budget music videos on a camcorder and...
