Blogcritics The critical lens on today's culture & entertainment
There’s a classic episode of South Park where one of the boys sees the girls playing with one of those fortunetelling paper constructions you wear on your hand. Thinking it possesses real prediction powers, he reports back to the other boys, who devise an intricate plan to purloin the device and gain the power for themselves. The Trojans, a new synthwave musical by Leegrid Stevens, uses the same (literal) device with similarly dramatic effectiveness. But here its power inheres to only one person: the Cassandra character in a recasting of the Iliad‘s tale of the Trojan War through the lens of a Texas high school football team. A team called, of course, the Trojans.
Trojans in the Warehouse
There’s yet another layer: The players in this drama of love, death, and the gridiron are actually workers in an Amazon shipping warehouse reminiscing about their high school glory days. The compact rectangle of Nancy Manocherian’s the cell theatre has been transformed into a carton-lined cavern of boxes, pallets and ladders that turn readily into vehicles, rooftops, a classroom, a football field and more. Director Eric Paul Vitale and choreographer Melinda Rebman brilliantly wrangle the large troupe in the small space.
The framing story, a look back from the perspective of a daily grind, helps make these hyper-vivid high school events seem plausible. After all, whether jock, nerd, or drama queen, we all experience our adolescent years as supernaturally vivid – our own mythology.
Vitale and Rebman stage the musical numbers with flair. The singing is mostly solid, the acting uniformly so. The production is lucky to have Deshja Driggs in the focal role of Heather, the show’s Helen of Troy, a human beam of light blazing at the center of a stellar cast.
Glory Days
Star running back Keeley (i.e. Achilles) has abandoned the team. Poetically flummoxed quarterback Johnny Memnon loses girlfriend Heather to Daris, an artsy student from the opposing school. All-American running back Jack works hard to keep up the team’s positivity, while seer Sondra haplessly foretells the disasters to come. A fine cast of supporting characters surrounds them.
The vocal arrangements are skillful and compelling, and the songs effectively push forward the plot and character development. But in and of themselves the songs aren’t always strong. At their best, they deliver the churning energy of ’80s pop. But sometimes they lack punch, especially in the overlong, repetitious and melodically challenged Act II sequence that starts with a fateful encounter on the highway and then (musically) just keeps going.
There’s also a sameness to the flavor of the recorded tracks. No doubt in a bigger production with a live band, Stevens or another arranger could sharpen up and ferment the music.
Still, although the hallucinogenic hybrid of humor and agita that sustains Act I flags for part of Act II, the second half picks up momentum as the personal stories of these mythologized teens collide ever more tragically. The Trojans is a voluminous, rainbow-hued spectacle of glory days and myth, staged and played with pomp and passion. It runs through April 26 at the cell theatre in NYC. Tickets are available online.
