Fly More Than You Fall offers the chance to see the wonderful Keala Settle up close and personal at Southwark Playhouse Elephant
“Just put one foot in front of the other
No-one cares something’s wrong with your mother”
There’s something almost aggressive about the pastel hues that dominate Stewart J Charlesworth’s set and costume design for Fly More Than You Fall, an arresting visual that doesn’t clue you in the right way for the production. Fortunately, the vocal colour in the opening rendition of the title track is much brighter as a mother packs her teenage daughter off to writing camp, unaware of the terrible medical news that will soon come her way.
It helps that that mother is played by Tony nominee Keala Settle in quite the casting coup for Southwark Playhouse and even in this first number which opens out to the ensemble, it is impossible not to be seduced by the extraordinary suppleness to her voice and her expressive phrasing – I could have listened to her runs and adlibs in the car for hours on end. So it is a bit of a gut wrench that it is her character Jennifer that gets the cancer diagnosis so early on.
Eric Holmes’ book focuses on Jennifer’s 15-year-old daughter though, Malia (an excellent Robyn Rose-Li), an aspiring writer and the multitudinous ways in which her world is shattered by this news. As she navigates terrible grief, she’s also figuring out her writing process through a new story about a pair of flightless birds and so as we follow her tumultuous relationship with her father and difficult times with her friends, her writing is dramatised in front of us as well, shifting with every rewrite.
It’s a whopping metaphorical device that possibly gets a little too much airtime here in Christian Durham’s production, for the impact that it gives us. It feels like there’s more mileage in delving into Jennifer’s personal relationships – with new writing pal and deeply kind soul Caleb (Max Gill in fine form), with a potential new love interest, with her grieving father Paul (Cavin Cornwall enriching an underwritten part) who is struggling to deal with a teenage daughter with lots of questions and smarts but not the emotional intelligence not to lash out unforgivably at him. Too often these interactions are rushed, space not given for repercussions to marinate and truly hit home, though you sense much potential with some revision.
Musically, Nat Zegree’s score tends to bombastic inspirational pop which is frequently very tuneful – Rose-Li matching Settle with some powerful vocals and the harmonies across the board are delightful – but across the whole show, a touch more variation might be useful and lyrically, Holmes and Zegree err a little too often to the clichéd rather than locating the emotional acuity of the situation. But even if I wasn’t left sobbing, my soul was oft-times stirred and not just by the spirit-lifting star quality of Keala Settle.
