Musical gets yellow card for heavy hand

But the young champions, even the scoring hero Kelly, soon discover they have no moves for eluding The Troubles -- the age-old religious intolerance and sectarian strife engulfing Belfast and Northern Ireland -- as the SSRq60s became the SSRq70s.

It is this ragtag team of fresh-faced teens captured in The Boys in the Photograph, the Andrew Lloyd Webber/Ben Elton musical snapshot that premiered with much expectation Thursday night at the Manitoba Theatre Centre. And the British cultural superstars, including Elton, who was in the opening-night audience, displayed some game, scoring an entertaining but not overwhelming victory.

The MTC season-ender is a $1.4-million do-over of The Beautiful Game, the original title of the Lloyd Webber/Elton collaboration that one critic tagged a feel-bad musical when it ran in London's West End in 2000-01.

Although generally brightened up in this version to an Irish West Side Story, it's hardly picture perfect. No stand-out Lloyd Webber tune, the serious material (it's hard to rhyme "knee-capping") and the awkwardly tacked-on happy ending suggest this Photograph may fade.

On the plus side are several sweet Lloyd Webber songs (none of which you will leave humming), very funny, often rude jokes courtesy of Elton's potent comic pen, and a likable, energetic, but starless cast that buzzed with youthful passion and commitment.

Father O'Donnell, who doubles as the squad's spiritual and soccer coach, presents each boy with a photograph of the "Boys in Green, the Emerald Team," along with the advice not to let the hatred of the world they are entering keep them from "the promise of your youth." For 160 minutes, we watch the core players play a very ugly and dangerous game on the streets of Belfast.

Winnipeg's own Brian Perchaluk has designed a gritty, grimy, shadowy depiction of Belfast. His impressive achievement is creating two large set pieces representing buildings that can be manually rotated by the cast to provide different looks of the neighbourhood. Ever-present are brick walls that the boys and their girls symbolically encounter daily.

Not so pleasant is Elton's thematic heavy hand. Everything is repeated again and again. If you don't get it all, Elton keeps score with overhead projections alerting us to what happens to John and friends -- who gets murdered, who gets crippled and who flees for freedom.

The why-can't-we-get-along preachiness finds traction in a closing that's shamelessly pitched to elicit a standing ovation with the video exhortation, "Let us love in peace." And the ever-ready-to-rise crowd during a preview abided.

These Irish teens are fanatical for footie, a sentiment that's rousingly expressed in the first big production number, The Beautiful Game, which throbs with gusto. It sends the message these are people fervent about soccer and everything.

Choreographer Tracey Flye has her team play out the championship game without a ball but moves that fall somewhere between ballet and calisthenics. In one of the most visually powerful scenes, John and his fellow inmates perform Dead Zone behind a 20-foot-high chain-link fence.

The central couple is the hunky John and his pretty, dark-haired girlfriend Mary. Their initial disdain for each other turns to desire in the cute duet Don't Like You. Mary, whom John nicknames Mary Luther King, advocates non-violence as a reaction to Northern Ireland's schism, but that doesn't mean she is any less a patriot. Erica Peck's strong-willed Mary sings a lovely God's Own Country, on which she is joined by an unidentified Protestant girl, both professing their love of Ireland. Slides of the green countryside serve as visual reinforcement.

Peck and Tony LePage, as John, are powerful singers who can make the audience care what happens to them. They even overcome a hackneyed awkward-wedding-night scene between virgins.

As Father O'Donnell, Richard McMillan is solid in dispensing the good word on nasty subjects. Shawn Meunier earns empathy as the innocent Ginger, who doesn't get long to enjoy his first kiss. Richard Harte's Thomas epitomizes the curse, "Born in Belfast, born Irish, born to hate."

Tracy Dawson and Jacquelyn French portray girlfriends with spunk and outstanding voices.

The most profound The Boys gets is during a tense confrontation between John and Thomas.

The latter chillingly declares that the civil war is not going to end and victory is "if we can insure that the struggle passes on to the next generation."

Those are prophetic words. Two British soldiers were murdered in March in Northern Ireland, suggesting The Troubles continue.

kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca

Theatre preview

The Boys in the Photograph

Manitoba Theatre Centre

To May 23

Tickets: $41-$86

Three and a half stars

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition May 2, 2009 C3