‘Once’ at the Academy of Music (1st review)

There was this indescribable moment when words and music came together and we knew we had a song—we had created magic. Even later recordings of that song never measured up to the moment that had given birth to that creation.

Love is like that, or we want to believe it is. That sappy ineffable moment when you just know that This Is It!

Unhappy repairman

Once is like that too. It’s a love song transformed into a play. Yes, it was also a movie (one I haven’t seen) but what appears on stage is the gentle blossoming of love set to lyrical tunes that are not quite hummable as you leave the theater but nevertheless lull you into a sense of contentment.

In Once, a Guy and a Girl meet cute— he’s a Hoover repairman, she’s a Czech musician who just happens to have a broken Hoover. (That’s a vacuum cleaner for those who don’t speak British). He’s fed up— with life, with music (he’s even abandoned his guitar).

All she can offer him in payment is music. He refuses, she insists. Next thing, they discover they can make beautiful music together.

Family and friends

But there’s a catch, several of them. All his love songs were written for another woman who left him, and she has a child at home and a husband somewhere else.

Can the Guy and Girl get together? The laws of musical romance say they should be able to overcome anything and find their way to happiness.

One of the essential elements of Once’s story is community. Although the lovers’ names are generic— any Girl and any Guy— these are not two waifs meeting on a cold dark night. They come from a rich world of family and friends, and we’re drawn into that world.

Musicians as characters

Yes, they’ve made bad choices in love— they’ve each been abandoned by the ones they love and can’t seem to see the love that’s right in front of them— but they’re not alone in the universe.

We in the audience become part of that world as well. We’re invited through the fourth wall onto the set itself. We can have drinks at the same bar the characters inhabit, hang out with the musicians before the show and during intermission.

Those musicians, who also play essential characters, remain on stage during the entire performance. They don’t go off into the wings and pretend they’re not there; they remain a part of the characters’ lives as a way of seeking connection and meaning in their own lives.

Lost in translation

The show has a gentle intimacy that’s perhaps dwarfed by the Academy of Music’s towering expanse, and the gentle tones of the singers are sometimes difficult to catch. Once is a show that demands attention.

Stuart Ward’s Guy seems a genuinely nice guy, a boy any mother would like her to daughter to be with. Dani de Waal’s Girl is full of determination and energy, whether she’s insisting that Guy fix her Hoover so it will suck, exhorting him on to fulfill his destiny as a musician, or urging him to go to his former girlfriend in the mystical wonderland of New York, where dreams are fulfilled and musical careers are made. She can only bear to tell him she loves him in a language he can’t understand.

(The device of having the characters speak English while the Czech translation appears on stage works to perpetuate the sense that these two characters never quite speak the same language until they start to play music together.)

Doomed romances

We in the audience, eager to swallow the clichés of love set to a beautiful ballad want to believe that their love can find a way, The songs in this musical deal with longing for love and the love that got away. Like Adele and Taylor Swift, Guy sings about the love he used to have.

But it’s never clear which love he’s singing to— his old girl friend in New York, who chose her career over her heart, or the woman standing before him who has brought him back to life. Just as Guy revived Girl’s broken Hoover and got it to “suck,” she has revived his desire to live and love and keep on creating music.

We want Girl and Guy to come together, yet we know that life is filled with missed opportunities. One of the sad and little recognized truths of love stories is that, in the great ones, the lovers part. Whether it’s Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet or Rick and Ilsa in Casablanca or Scarlett and Rhett in Gone with the Wind, great love, it seems, is doomed.

Your choice

Only in romantic comedies have we come to assume that lovers should be joined at the end of the story— even if we sense that they’re never going to make it.

So is Once a romance or a romantic comedy? Well, which do you want it to be? Or is it enough just to make beautiful music together even for just a little while?

To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.