Musicals miss the high notes

REVIEW:AS THE GRAND Canal Theatre hosts its first visiting musical theatre production, Andrew Lloyd Webber's Whistle Down the Wind, the paucity of indigenous opportunities for similar ventures in Ireland is strikingly apparent. Indeed, the Grand Canal's opening is something of a relief.

West End touring productions to the Gaiety and the Olympia theatres have always been a mixed bag. Their infrastructures are unable to support the grand-scale production values that musical theatre demands, the cycloramas and deep perspectives that are the hallmarks of commercial theatre. The necessary economics of reduced chorus sizes and understudy leads for touring casts exacerbates these production problems. Up until now, comparing the same production of West Side Storyin Dublin and London has been pointless, and spectaculars such as The Lion Kinghad no theatre in Ireland capable of housing them.

Ireland has no musical theatre tradition of its own. Irish theatre developed in the 20th century in opposition to the commercially-inflected tradition of British theatre, and has remained by and large literary and elitist. Popular theatre in Ireland is only just beginning to be properly resourced, as companies such as Lane Productions, whose theatrical version of The Shawshank Redemptionis currently running at the Gaiety Theatre, provide an indigenous alternative to the staple of touring shows on which commercial theatres in Ireland survive.

The shallow depth and wing-space of the 19th-century structures of the Gaiety and the Olympia cannot facilitate large-scale spectacles and the O2 has not managed to create a suitable performance structure – a recent touring production of We Will Rock Youwas performed on a set cobbled together from scaffolding.

The limited audience base in Ireland cannot recoup the average production budget of a musical. Musical theatre, with its spectacular thrust, its large casts and live musicians, is an expensive pursuit – Andrew Lloyd Webber's most recent show, the poorly reviewed Love Never Dies, cost an estimated £13 million.

Finally, and perhaps most shamefully, there is the lack of training (not talent) among Irish performers. As RTÉ's Fame(a reality-TV programme borrowed from Andrew Lloyd Webber's similar talent-search vehicle on BBC) has confirmed, the chasm between performers trained in London and their Irish-based competitors is enormous. The new Academy of Dramatic Arts, which will open at Trinity College in association with Rada, should provide a welcome forum for developing talent in Ireland.

Despite such difficulties, there have been some notable attempts to kick-start a musical theatre movement in Ireland. In 2005, Shay Healy's The Wiremenattempted to domesticate the dramatic elements of musical theatre with a nostalgic backward glance to pre-electric Ireland, while borrowing heavily from international scores. But in conception and production it lacked professional polish. Arthur Matthew's I, Keano,which also premiered in 2005, brought slapstick comedy to what can often be an overly-serious genre. However, with songs deeply invested in topical references and characters that remained caricatures of contemporary cultural figures, it was more Spitting Imagethan Spamalot. The similarly-inspired football musical Macbeckssuffered the same fate; its cartoonish elements were mirrored in its cobbled-together aesthetic.

By contrast, the 2009 production Michael Collins: The Musical,which developed over several years, attempted to create an Irish musical of epic significance. While the stark design and compact chorus might have been an economic imperative, the aesthetic seemed organic to the action. However, the alignment of manipulative rising chords of musical motifs with calls for blood sacrifice (Andrew Lloyd Webber meets Westlife via Riverdance) was somewhat troubling. The nature of the failures of these recent ventures highlights the general trend for musical theatre in Ireland, which has by and large been imitative rather than original.

Over the last five years, however, Irish theatre has begun to evolve a new form of musical theatre on its own terms. The evolution began with Improbable Frequency, a satirical musical by Arthur Riordan, who had already begun experimenting with the musical form in the 1990s with The Emergency Room, a series of rap-songs performed by a fictionalised Eamon de Valera, and in 2001 the hip-hopera Rap Éire, with comedian Des Bishop. With Improbable Frequency, Riordan graduated to full-fledged composition. A spy-thriller about a crossword fanatic sent to Dublin to gather intelligence on the Irish republican movement, the musical thrust relied heavily on verbal experiment. Its avant garde expressionistic musical style was integral to Riordan's subversive take on Irish history. It was a perfect marriage of forms.

Meanwhile, two exciting new musical theatre projects currently in development look set to further explode Irish expectations of musical theatre in an off-off-Broadway rather than West End style: Randolf SD's Elemenope Jonesand Thisispopbaby's similarly ambitious Alice in Funderland, both of which are being funded for development by the Arts Council. Wayne Jordan, writer-director of Elemenope Jonessays that musical theatre was what attracted him to theatre in the first place: "I didn't know there was a difference between musicals and serious theatre, but I loved the shameless emotional expression musicals [allow]." He was never attracted to working with musical theatre in its conventional form, where "the production gets in the way of what is happening between the audience and those on stage and the general trend is for stories that are very socially conservative".

For Jordan, paring back musical theatre to its bare-bone elements is not just a matter of resources. It allows him to be political, and with a story such as Elemenope Jones, focusing on a materialistic vixen who could only be a product of the last 10 years of Irish history, the ironic contrast between musical theatre's celebratory conventions and the company's desire to deconstruct cultural mores makes a brilliant match.

It is in the exploitation and interrogation of the commercial conservative beast of musical theatre where aspirant musical theatre artists will find a voice of their own. In the meantime, the Grand Canal Theatre has programmed enough West End transfers to keep the dream alive.