Philadelphia Theatre Company and American Repertory Theater present the Lazours’ Night Side Songs

Let me try that again. This is a story about medical professionals, caregivers, patients, and an attempt to bring the act of musical-worship back into American life. The show, by sibling co-creators David and Patrick Lazour, is inspired by real-life stories and interviews. It debuted in January at New York’s Under the Radar festival for experimental theater, and before its official world premiere on the Suzanne Roberts stage, it spent the first half of February on a tour of free performances at Philly-area hospital and human-services institutions. (After the PTC run, this production will head to co-producer American Repertory Theater in Cambridge.)

Instructed to feel

We in the audience are instructed to take the tissues and pass as necessary. We will be instructed quite a bit over the course of this show’s 100-minute runtime. Oh, and yes, there will be crying. Crying by actors, by audience members, and (looking into the rafters) even the tech crew.

Every feeling is telegraphed, plumped, and hosed over you in a splattering of Hallmark channel cliches: cancers, a horny but shameful priest, five deaths, a nagging elderly mother, a wedding scene, multiple medical professionals “just trying their best”, and a singer-songwriter beach bum. There are no memorable characters and no overarching point in this slice-of-life narrative passivity, beyond live laugh love through life’s hardship.

The one decent metaphor we get, about how atomic models resemble those of solar systems, implying that life and physical matter are an infinitely recursive phenomenon, is in the end revealed to be based on a sculpture on the Penn Medicine campus. Its recurrence seems to be an authorial tic, without substance.

When the body believes

Every time some interpersonal nuance appears, the ensemble announces the required feeling by saying things like “Yasmine was sad” or “they love each other.” But thanks to the expert cast, crew, and direction by PTC co-artistic director Taibi Magar, this is less of a bludgeoning and more of a delicate, fast-paced whip. It doesn’t matter that the writing is bad. My body believes everything that is happening on stage. Brooke Ishibashi, regardless of who she’s playing (central character Yasmine Hollie), is in fact dying before my eyes.

The cast’s collective ability to fluidly perform rapid-fire emotional shifts and hair-pin character changes is deeply unsettling and alarmingly effective (Ishibashi is joined onstage by Jonathan Raviv, Jordan Dobson, Robi Hager, and Mary Elizabeth Scallen). The heavy subject matter, combined with the proximity and intimacy of the space, demands that we be moved, or disturbed, or that we dissociate to make the time pass. By the end, our tear ducts know the cues.

Now for the music

There is music, too! (This is a musical, right?) What blend of styles and genres is this music exactly? If you’ve listened to the radio or have even a passing familiarity with musical theater, you already know every note. Almost every song is a 15-30 second hook repeated incessantly in two- to four-minute chunks. Every song contains one theme, one emotion, looping drivel with no expectation or ability to sustain progress or narrative.

The real tear-jerker for much of the audience at the show I attended was a song performed by Scallen, a mournful ditty (“My Stuff”) about what’s going to happen to her things after she dies: “Please just don’t throw it all away.” (The Lazours are decidedly not the Shakespeares of our day.) By this point, 80 minutes in, our psyches have been reduced to that of an obedient child—the final blow being the faint acknowledgement that Americans love collecting garbage.

For half the songs, this musical looping facilitates “sing-along” passages, where the slightest hint of musical unpredictability might confuse the audience. We come in and exit on cue, all call-and-response, complete with hymnals. The Lazours present a sanitized and industrial version of religious music, an attempt to fill the G-d Shaped Hole with cliché and TikTok-ified musical theater.

I wonder if the Lazours have ever actually listened to religious music or communal music-making. What if the actual model of this show’s music wasn't anything to do with G-d or myth, but educational entertainment like Kahoot and GoNoodle: music for children, for institutions, music to exert control? Instead of a model of communal music-making, the Lazours have stumbled onto something more powerful and pernicious: a model for mass obedience.

An interview with David and Patrick Lazour and director Taibi Magar is available on the BSR Podcast. Listen here.