Sousatzka

Book by Craig Lucas, music by David Shire, lyrics by Richard Maltby, Jr., directed by Adrian Noble. Through April 9 at the Elgin Theatre, 189 Yonge St. Ticketmaster.ca or 1-855-985-5000.

Even before it opened, this world-premiere musical was one of the most talked-about events of the Toronto theatre season. The attention is in part because of its epic scale, which feels as if it’s from a different time: a cast of 47, a storyline that moves between apartheid-era Soweto, 1980s London, and the Warsaw Ghetto in the Second World War, and a running time of over two and a half hours including intermission.

But doubtless its most attention-grabbing aspect is its high-profile producer, Garth Drabinsky, making a return to theatre after spending 17 months in prison for fraud and forgery. The show is his baby in every way: it was his idea to turn the 1962 novel by Bernice Rubens, Madame Sousatzka, into a musical. He worked on developing the material while behind bars, and has been a constant presence throughout the rehearsal process.

But grandeur of ambition does not necessarily lead to convincing theatre, and it’s not just the scale here that feels old-fashioned.

Sousatzka, simply and sadly put, is an overproduced, overcomplicated mess, hobbled by a weak book and lyrics and even weaker music. The attempt is to tell a grand, sweeping story, but plot and character points are narrated (indeed, hammered home) rather than embodied.

The focus is on its central figures’ shared, tragic pasts: the title character (played by the luminous Victoria Clark) is a Jewish survivor of the War who makes her living as a piano teacher in London while grappling with Big Demons From The Past. Her latest protégé is Themba (Jordan Barrow), who fled South Africa when his father was imprisoned for anti-racist activism. Demons, he’s got them too.

Their redemption will be in each other: this is foreshadowed ponderously from the start. But a central problem is that so many other characters’ stories are involved that this becomes a cacophony rather than symphony of tales, some of them attempting to be inspiring, others self-consciously quirky. The intent behind Craig Lucas’s script seems to be to offer a portrait of unlikely but inspirational bonds between people of different backgrounds and age groups, but simplistic and sometimes objectifying cultural depictions are a regrettable side effect of the show’s too-wide narrative sweep.

Director Adrian Noble and set designer Anthony Ward have accomplished the massive task of keeping the staging moving, but cannot make sense of the material’s constant motion between different tones and moods. It’s unlikely anyone could have.

Themba’s parents Jabulani (Ryan Allen) and Xholiswa (Montego Glover) — educated, dedicated anti-apartheid activists — have the potential to be fascinating characters, and the stories of how expatriate South Africans continued their movement in London and what life was like on Robben Island have the potential to compel.

But the shorthanding required to fit this material into the show leads to the African characters being stereotyped as spirited, soulful victims.

Even more sketchily drawn are the scenes from Sousatzka’s past, and this is problematic because her internal struggle ends up the show’s through-line. Having the chorus appear behind a scrim, singing in Hebrew as hundreds of portraits of the (presumably) dead and imprisoned in the Ghetto stream along the walls of the theatre into an onstage picture frame, is a highly emotive image, superbly executed by projection designer Jon Driscoll.

But again, because it’s so isolated and decontextualized, it is emotionally manipulative and objectifies Jews as victims.

The third life-world of the show is the London house where Sousatzka lives with an oh-so-contrivedly wacky band of misfits: the closeted geriatric actor turned osteopath (Nick Wyman), the punk manic pixie dream girl Jenny (Sara Jean Ford), and the Countess (Judy Kaye), who — we find out through scene after scene of clunky and unclear exposition — owns the place, dabbles in the occult, and sets events in motion to release Sousaztka’s Big Demons by revealing Big Secrets.

Jenny is lumbered with offensive gender stereotyping (she’s oversexed and her brother taught her to kiss — what?!) and credulity-sapping plotting about the married impresario she’s sleeping with who ends up being Themba’s ticket to the big time.

And then there’s poor Barrow as Themba, some kind of symbol of raw talent who’s pulled in multiple directions by his mother figures but is radically underdeveloped as a character in his own right. A couple of second-act solo numbers for him (“Gifted,” “Nguwe”) are too little insight into his psyche. too late. The show asks over and over again who Themba Khenketha is, but doesn’t have the creative wherewithal to address the question.

This is a show about the power of music, which puts enormous pressure on its composer and lyricist to produce something world-class themselves, under which David Shire and Richard Maltby, Jr. — senior figures who never quite made it to the top of the Broadway hierarchy — have buckled. A major theme is that stuff is great: eccentric people are great (“Brand New Family”), dancing is great (“All I Wanna Do (Is Go Dancin’)”), South Africa is great (“Rainbow Nation”), Christmas is great (“Christmas Always Comes Again”), being rich and snooty is great (“Manders’ Salon”).

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While not musically hugely memorable, there are some powerful ballads for Clark and Glover to reveal their thoughts and feelings (“Song of the Child,” “This Boy”) which these excellent performers deliver with conviction. However, what we find out doesn’t really add much to what we know about them from their outward statements and actions.

The whole cast gives it everything they’ve got, but particularly in the self-consciously barnstorming big numbers, the strain of their effort is painful to watch.

Imprisoned underdogs looking for redemption; the inexorable pull of past trauma; an obsession with victimization: It’s impossible to look at this show’s subject matter and not read autobiographical connections with the disgraced producer who created it. The question swirling around this project from the get-go is how Drabinsky, given his record, could bring artists and particularly investors on board to believe in him yet again. Having seen the show, the glaring question is whether he and everyone else actually think it is of quality.

Much depends on the reception of these premiere performances in Toronto: while Drabinsky’s articulated desire is to take it to Broadway later this year, no New York theatre is yet booked. Perhaps more development work (and investors’ cash) will be dropped into it in attempts to render it transfer-ready. In its current state, though, it seems unsalvageable.

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