KXT on Broadway, September 4
5/10
What enticing premises for a play: punk-rock, intergenerational conflict and internet-spawned copyright conundrums. Add an actor of Zoe Carides’ credentials, live music and exchanges between in-person and on-screen performers, and The Bridge was packed with potential.
The great ideas, alas, translated into a modest play and disappointing production. I’d hoped The Bridge might just crack the code of an engaging play based on the soggy carpets and raucous excitement of the rock scene, but, like Andrew Upton’s 2007 Riflemind, it lost its way – this time despite (or because of) being a collaboration between three playwrights: Sunny Grace, Richie Black and Clare Hennessy.
Directed by Lucinda Williams for CrissCross Productions, and here having its world-premiere season, the play has Carides playing Amber, a hard-living punk/grunge singer and songwriter of talent, who was so close to 1990s stardom she could smell it. Then she fell pregnant to whichever male groupie it was that night, and decided to keep the child. Even without the unwanted pregnancy, she was not cut out for playing the game the way a corporatised rock industry demanded. She had a singular capacity for self-detonation at critical career moments, inclining her to spit on the hand trying to feed her.
Fast-forward to now, and Alyssa (Hennessy) is obsessed with the bare-fisted pugnacity Amber’s writing and her singing. Alyssa toys with TikTok to distraction, and among her followers is Layne, Amber’s mid-20s son (Saro Lepejian), who feeds her a demo of Amber’s finest song, Medea’s Curse. Alyssa turns it into a TikTok hit, with obligatory provocative dance moves.
The cast is completed by Brendan Miles as Phil, Amber’s grasping manager, Andrea Mugpalong, who plays both Amber’s bassist in the past, and Phil’s publicist in the present, and Matt Abotomey, who has three characters, including a very funny turn as a TV talk-show host trying to interview a smashed Amber.
But the play feels too closely modelled on someone’s theory of story arcs, while the dialogue keeps plunging into sinkholes of banality, extracting itself only with a sudden burst of wit or insight. Given this, Abotomey and especially Lepejian cover themselves in relative glory, the latter making Layne the play’s most credible character. Had this level of truth been contagious, perhaps the text’s pitfalls may have been better camouflaged.
Other than in an excellent scene in which Layne films Amber for a TikTok riposte to Alyssa, Carides, who we know can excel, disappoints. She’s more convincing as the Amber of now than of the ’90s, but ultimately she doesn’t make us believe enough to sympathise. Hennessy also struggles, although, as is intended, the on-screen Alyssa is more compelling than the on-stage version – until the very end.
Hennessy and Carides co-wrote the pivotal song, Medea’s Curse, and it’s a cracker. The show could still be salvaged, were it reworked with this song and Lepejian’s performance as benchmarks.
Until September 13.
https://www.kingsxtheatre.com/the-bridge