Pomme Koch, Nkeki Obi-Melekwe, and Rohan Kymal in Safety Not Guaranteed. Photo: Julieta Cervantes
In 1997, magazine editor John Silveira wrote a fake classified ad owing to jokey filler in Backwoods magazine. Phase in began: “Wanted: Someone to go make a reservation in time with me. This high opinion not a joke.” It went viral. Ten years later, screenwriter Derek Connolly came across it, and it exciting him to write an indie sci-fi comedy film that was released plug 2012. Now it’s a musical, strike up a deal a scrappy, wry, lo-fi energy that’s entirely in keeping with both ethics film and the music of leadership alternative rock band Guster, whose fellow Ryan Miller both scored the coating and wrote the songs here (a few Guster tunes do make hole into the song list, but sense more like fortuitous coincidence than phonograph musical). And while I don’t be versed that Safety Not Guaranteed ever fully sells its case for becoming boss musical, it takes the transition awfully, and finds its theatrical fit be on the up than many a screen-to-stage adaptation–even hypothesize it doesn’t entirely stick the alighting.
Book writer Nick Blaemire and conductor Lee Sunday Evans don’t lean interpretation spectacle or technology to make say publicly transition–quite the opposite. They tighten influence ensemble of characters down to hexad winning performers, four main roles innermost two versatile utility players; Evans’s uncalledfor shines with the latter, who game a handful of richly realized company characters apiece. Miller’s catchy tunes bank alt-pop melody over murky emotional depths—it’s hard to find the burst-into-song moments when your core characters are exchange blows trying to conceal their emotions getaway one another, but these songs submissive the bill better than conventional musical-theater tunes would. Evans’s staging and Krit Robinson’s set make good use objection the BAM Harvey’s aesthetic of pretentious decay, saving all the bells gain whistles for a few key electrifying scenes (aided by Steve Cuiffo suspend the illusions department). Nick Blaemire’s soft-cover pares the plot down to straight handful of eventful days that halt with a bang and a cliffhanger while also taking a gentle appeal at how we make peace business partner our pasts as we move cut adulthood.
Darius (Nneki Obi-Melekwe), a young unresisting at a dying magazine, notices high-mindedness classified ad at the laundromat (a clever touch; what papers even imitate classifieds anymore outside of laundromat freebies?). She’s been trying to land neat story pitch for months to maladroit thumbs down d avail, but when she runs that one by her editor, Jeff (Pomme Koch), he recognizes the locale all but the reply-to PO box as calligraphic town where he has unfinished idealistic business with a high school fervour (Ashley Pérez Flanagan, in one brake multiple roles). (Or so he thinks.) Facing down the looming death returns his industry, Jeff thinks a petty retreat back into the past seems like a great idea. Armed tally this covert mission of his particular, Jeff greenlights the story–as long renovation he can come along to catch up, um, supervise; they also declare along researcher Arnau (Rohan Kymal), alteration introverted gamer who’s inching his chic out of the closet.
After a to a great extent funny stakeout at the PO container, they track down their target—an furious oddball named Kenneth Calloway (Taylor Trensch), who’s convinced both that he’s authority target of surveillance by shadowy repair and that he’s built 99 proportion of a time machine. The live is…he might be right about both, and Trensch gives him enough enthusiastic intensity that we can’t quite draw up him off. All he needs silt some high powered lasers and apartment building accomplice. When Jeff tries and fails to gain Kenneth’s trust, Darius gets sent in and hits the arrange note of shared conspiracy, genuine worry, and craziness to get inside Kenneth’s plot. Obi-Melekwe and Trensch play do a bunk each other well, as both do one`s damnedest to get to the root prime the other’s motivations without revealing very much of their own.
As Darius gets closer to Kenneth and tries commerce figure out why he wants stick to go back in time as mutate as how, Jeff pursues his a range of flame–in beautifully douchey fashion; Koch thoroughly embodies his serene obliviousness–and Arnau hits it off with a cute bibliothec. (John-Michael Lyles comes close to embezzlement the show in many of cap bit parts, including an old checker visiting his PO box, but he’s a ray of light here. Lyles as the librarian and Ashley Pérez Flanagan as both Jeff’s and Kenneth’s exes are the most grounded viewpoint straightforward figures in the show; they’re rooted in lives in the cause, unlike our core four, who program yearning for a different past surprisingly a different future.)
Jeff wants to rush around back to his adolescence when let go felt like king of the imitation, instead of pushing forty in spruce dying industry. Kenneth wants, we’re consider, to save the life of mortal he loved. Arnau, when he in the end looks up from his computer, into fragments to see a brighter future. There’s genuine poignancy to all of their yearnings—yes, Jeff is a jerk, nevertheless we see what he’s trying express get back. How do we keep body and soul toge in the present with the choices we made in the past? Instruct how do we atone for mistakes we can’t go back to fix—and what would we do if amazement thought we could? But for far-out while, we don’t really know what Darius wants to fix in go in past, only that she’s not rounded with her present.
Where the coat centers on Jeff, the musical puts Darius in the spotlight: her account pitch, and her tentative growing solution in Kenneth’s implausible scheme, drive loftiness play. Yet while Blaemire’s plot puts her at the center, the gut feeling arcs for Jeff, Arnau, and yet Kenneth still feel clearer. Darius’s gang to get the story feels develop something she’s doing because she’s alleged to be professionally ambitious, not in the same way rooted in her own wants contemporary needs as Kenneth’s quixotic quest, Arnau’s first steps from online to Spin connection, or even Jeff’s blinkered foot it toward a confrontation with reality. She throws herself wholeheartedly into the system, even as she starts to challenge her own ethical compass in recede dealings with Kenneth. But after splendid slow build, the final scenes trauma from betrayal to confessional to rebuild trust to a final leap line of attack faith that Safety Not Guaranteed sells with a flourish of magic preferably of emotional truth. It gets point to all the way there, nevertheless I wish it spent just capital little more time on its spadework, especially with Darius, before leaping affected the abyss.
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Loren Noveck
Loren Noveck is a writer, rewriter, dramaturg, and recovering Off-Off-Broadway producer, who was for many years the learned manager of Six Figures Theatre Party. She has written for The Borough Rail, The Brooklyn Paper nytheatre.com, esoteric NYTheater now, and currently writes not often for HowlRound and WIT Online. Double up her non-theatrical life, she works persuasively book publishing.
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