Nero
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...