Obviously it would be lovely if the final musical from Spring Awakening composer Duncan Sheik and his lyrical partner Steven Sater was a masterpiece.
It’s not. Nero isn’t entirely new, either – a very different version entitled Nero (Another Golden Rome) ran in San Francisco back in 2006 (back then it was billed as a play with songs rather than a musical).
But Sater has been actively working on this Southwark Playhouse production from veteran British director Lindsay Posner and so I don’t suppose we can really shrug it off as an early, sophomoric work: this is Nero’s final form.
The concept is fun: it imagines the Roman Emperor Nero as a sort of frivolous theater kid who is blindsided when his scheming mother Agrippina (Sally Dexter) murders everyone in his path to the throne. Sater’s book is lurid into the extreme, with Andrew Barth Feldman’s Nero an omnisexual cross-dressing horndog who fritters Rome’s wealth away on golden monuments to himself and maintains a semblance of control by impressive deliveries of the speeches written for him by pragmatic advisor Seneca (Stephen Carlile).
This is, to be fair, congruent with ancient histories: which may or may not have been accurate but clearly that’s the version of the man that intrigued Sater and Sheik.
Nero is an omnisexual cross-dressing horndog
And that’s fine but the problem is Sater’s book and lyrics make so little effort to understand where Nero is coming from that it loses any emotional impact it might have had. You don’t have to be sympathetic to Nero to wonder why the peppy young naïf of the first couple of scenes is immediately cool with having his wife-slash-stepsister Octavia (Nabi Brown) put under house arrest and his stepbrother Britannicus (Rory Maguire) poisoned. Why set Nero up as a nice young man with an admittedly unhealthy mummy complex if you’re going to abandon that entire side of his character immediately?
There are also some clanging attempts to compare Nero to Donald Trump via Seneca’s speeches decrying immigration and taxes. I get it – does Trump believe half the stuff he says or is he happy to parrot his advisors so long as he gets to build stupid monuments to himself – but it’s not developed enough to work properly and ends up feeling crass.
Nero is also calling out for a larger budget than is available to it. Posner’s campy, vampy cabaret approach is a sensible enough idea on limited means and designer Georgia Lowe does some fun things with all the gold lamé the pot would stretch to (quite a lot to be fair). But Posner is really a safe-pair-of-hands West End guy. He doesn’t have the audacity to do anything too mad here, and as such Nero is full of moments begging for more: more backing dancers, more choreography, more visual excess. The weirdly anachronistic togas’n’guns aesthetic is interesting but feels underexplored.
That accepted, diminutive Dear Evan Hanson Broadway star Feldman is very good in the title role: casting an actual American-accented theater kid makes it so much more obvious what the show is aiming at than it might if he was just some random Brit. And the songs – while not up there with Spring Awakening – are decent, especially a couple of Radiohead ballad-style numbers in the show’s generally stronger second half.
Nero is a curio and if Sater can’t get it any more coherent than this after two decades, this is presumably just how it is. But it has its merits and one thing you can say about the Sater-Sheik partnership: it was never boring.
