This sparky indie musical about a lonely Irish schoolboy who forms a band as a means to escape a drab ’80s Dublin adolescence is a charming affair. And it reunites the chief architects of Once, one of the more offbeat transatlantic musical smashes of recent times, 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 same way as 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 and Sing Street defies sense. The titular band seem to be effortlessly polished straight away and yet they never appear to gig or earn any money, they just make little low budget music videos on a camcorder and then move on to the next song.
Which is fine because it’s a musical and because the songs perhaps represent the escape music offers over and above the idea that the band is literally supposed to be reeling out endless chart ready tracks straight away.
And if the band was shaping up to be the next U2 it would change their lives too much: part of the point of being a hormonal schoolboy is that it’s often mortifyingly cringe, and crucially the cringe factor never leaves Taichman’s production. There is obviously something gloriously excruciating about Conor writing endless songs about the aloof Raphina, even when she inevitably comes around to it.
It’s all very breathless and winsome: Sheridan Townsley’s Conor is the right mix of cocky and vulnerable – just like a proper rock star! – and Hunter offers a poignant turn as Brendan, his younger brother’s damaged shadow. Jesse Nyakudya’s highly strung Eamon aside, the show is happy to blitz through the characters of Conor’s bandmates without too much care: they seem nice but Sing Street is well advised to not get too bogged down in them.
It’s a breezy paen to the extreme ups and downs of adolescence. It also doesn’t try to compete with the spectacle of the big boy musicals: Sonya Tayeh’s choreography is largely limited to the band’s endearingly rudimentary moves; the songs are largely diegetic band numbers and on the odd occasion a character does just randomly burst into song there’s no cavalcade of backing dancers.
It could be better. The music is weirdly inconsistent. The band essentially do one very fun New Romantic pastiche (‘The Riddle of the Model’) before Gary Clark’s songs – co-written with Carney – simply give up on the ’80s and opt for a sound closer to post-reunion Take That. It feels like a missed opportunity to give the show a clearer sense of time and place – plus, frankly, more interesting songs. Clark is a bona fide ’80s music scene survivor, but he’s largely worked as a contemporary pop writer for hire in recent years, and clearly it’s not as simple as just restoring himself to his ’85 factory settings.
Perhaps to balance this out there are a handful of classic ’80s indie tunes simply played over the PA, which is nice in its way but they’re inconsistently spaced and it feels odd for a musical to be leaning into pre-recorded music so much, especially when tracks like ‘Please Please Let me Get What I Want’ and ‘Inbetween Days’ are inevitably vastly better than the original numbers. If Sing Street is to have a further life I think this stuff needs to be reconsidered, as does the bombastic but very long climax, which jettisons the nimbleness of the show’s earlier sections in favour of, to be honest, milking it.
A very likeable little musical, even if it currently has more of the air of a fondly regarded provincial indie band than a globe conquering rock legend.
