When?: Wednesday 5th June 2024
How much?: £45, stalls row D
To begin
Standing at the Sky's Edge is technically a jukebox musical using the music of Sheffield-born singer-songwriter Richard Hawley. I say technically because it manages to not feel like one in the way that &Juliet or Once Upon A One More Time do, though that might just have been because I didn't know his music very well. It's set in Sheffield with three distinct decades depicted in the same flat. Time jumps a lot and the stories sometimes intermingle, and to be quite honest I was impressed by how effortless they made it seem. It opened at the Crucible in Sheffield in 2019, a pandemic happened, and then it ended up in London, first at the National and then at the Gillian Lynne.
Craft
Book
Strongest part of the show for me, the book was natural, engaging, never too wordy but never so optimised for an incoming song that you felt like you were just being fed pure plot. It made me feel a little better about the long stretches of songless pages I have in my current draft, reminding me that the common belief that you must "ruthlessly cut all dialogue that doesn't develop character or advance plot" doesn't mean longer stretches of dialogue are inherently bad.
Music
I'm being intentionally vague here, but it was fine. I wouldn't listen to a Richard Hawley album in my spare time.
Lyrics
Given its jukeboxiness, these were not musical-theatre style lyrics. As pop songs, I'd say some of the lyrics were pretty bad and some were just fine, but I'm not writing pop songs for my show so whatevs.
Cast
Mostly very very good but also fucking HUGE? Like 30 people. I'm not going to talk about specific actors but the singers were mostly very strong and I reminded myself that when you write for professionals, you can go a little wild, make things a little funkier, trickier, whatever else.
I was very drawn in because the acting was mostly superb. It isn't a particularly comedic show, so when things were even a little bit funny, it felt very natural and earned. Kudos to the director, I suppose.
One of the storylines follows people from Liberia who become refugees in the UK due to war back home. The show touches on their experience of racism in the UK without them becoming defined solely by it, and I commend everyone involved for how well I felt it was incorporated.
There were a couple of accent flubs that bothered me, but I assume most people don't really care. This made me think about my show again because I am writing characters who speak English but are from a variety of countries. I'm not really sure how to handle that without them all just sounding like native speakers with an accent (which isn't how L2 speakers actually sound). I might make a post about this another time, but here's something I read about this a while ago.
Choreography wasn't for me, but the friends I was with said they loved it.
Production
Time for some bullet points!
- The set was huge and imposing but also blank and malleable. Nicely done.
- The lighting was moody and gorgeous although a little predictable. I love mostly not thinking about things like the lighting while I'm writing.
- Actors sometimes sang into handheld mics, or mics on mic stands, and sometimes they just sang with a lav or headset picking them up. This was confusing.
- The band was solid, but the guitarist came out for a couple of solos and I found it very awkward. Note to self: don't write solos for musicians in this show.
Summary
I wasn't that bothered by the music, but the acting and the general atmosphere (along with a few interesting plot bits) got me crying at least twice. And ugh, it's so nice to have a Yorkshire story.
Score
7.3 Sheffields.