The Smiths, the musical

"Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others" is a stage musical based on the tunes of 1980s alt.melodrama band The Smiths. Directed by Andrew Wale with musical direction by Perrin Manzer Allen, the show runs for another week in London, followed by Ireland and Australia. From the New York Times:

"Some Girls" seeks the spirit of the Smiths' songs by transforming them. The arrangements are not for rock band, but for string quartet with electronics. Morrissey's heartsick legato croon is reassigned to four women and two men, who deliver anything from keening, primal unaccompanied wails to swing-era harmonies. The Smiths' lyrics were proudly defenseless and unguarded: "I know I'm unlovable/ You don't have to tell me." Yet the staging doesn't wrap them in obvious scenarios. The show is an allusive, surreal, ever-mutating fantasia on love and sex, family and control, violence and death.

The women take on archetypal roles as a child, a young woman and a mother; there's also a red-headed diva. An older and younger man are like a father and grown son; and there's a young boy on video, at first isolated and frightened, but eventually smiling and stepping into the light. They interact in love and rage, but there is no simple story. The younger man, Garrie Harvey, sings, "I am human and I want to be loved" while dressed as a rabbit; the girlish Katie Brayben is at various times a cellist, a trapeze artist and a gunslinger.

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