THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
Hex nearly got hexed. This ambitious new musical, a retelling of Sleeping Beauty by the National Theatre’s Artistic Director Rufus Norris and designer Katrina Lindsay, was first performed in December 2021. It struggled through previews, theater twitter badly dissed it, and then the Omicron variant slashed its audiences and cast members and it was all just a mess. There was no opening night. Unbowed, director Norris has had another go, brought it back with revisions and cast changes and, for the most part, it works.
Unlike plays, musicals just have too many moving parts to open cold. They need workshopping, revising and rewriting to an extent that can’t be achieved in a week of previews. The history of the Broadway musical is packed with rewrites in Philadelphia and Boston and sometimes a show doesn’t work until later productions, for example Merrily We Roll Along.
Katrina Lindsay’s Gothic costumes are a suitably imaginative trip but the single set, a backdrop of glittery spindles with a miniature fairy castle which revolves to reveal Sleeping Beauty’s bed, is rather too sparse for a high-profile Christmas show in this large space.
Hex gives us the fairy tale from the perspective of the fairy who cast the curse, here the Low Fairy. In this version she’s more misunderstood than evil and the arc of the story is how she finds her purpose. Lisa Lambe, an incredibly talented Irish vocalist, gives her a gloriously distracted, vaguely punkish demeanor. She looks disheveled in a frayed, muddy, tutu, but yet she’s stout-hearted, and streetwise when necessary.
From the outset three arch High Fairies descend from on high and decide that Low Fairy isn’t quite ready to get her wings, they feel she isn’t sufficiently detached, and so they abandon her. She encounters a courtier (a perky Michael Matus) who brings her to the royal palace where the haughty French Queen (Neïma Naouri) commands her to make her annoyingly restless baby (Rose) go to sleep.
She finds herself unable to cast a spell, or a ‘bless’, a tussle ensues, and she ends up putting a hex on the young princess, resulting in her long sleep. Curiously this leaves her magic-less as well as guilty and so she spends the next 100 years trying to undo the mess.
Ronder’s book does struggle with tone at times, but it has a vein of charm to the fore which at its best recalls The Princess Bride. The key problem with it is that the big themes (the ‘why’) are not underlined early enough, so it lacks focus and by the end, when they are spelled out it in the finale, it has lost purchase on the audience’s emotions.
The songs, by Jim Fortune and Rufus Norris, are very well crafted and have more variety to them than most contemporary new musical fare. They range from the power ballad gusto of ‘One’ or ‘Above it All’, to the ‘60s soul-band infused ‘Mine is the Kiss’. That’s sung by a witty convocation of nerdy Princes, all competing for Rose’s hand. Then there’s Mark Oxtoby as Bruiser, the wideboy leader of the malignant gang of ‘thorns’, whose vocal style is Cockney ska – think of ‘80s group Madness.
Adult Rose is of course awakened by a handsome Prince, wonderfully called Bert, and played with great boyish exuberance by Michael Elcock.
The problem, to put it mildly, is his mother, Queenie. She’s half ogre-half human and so when grandchildren arrive she struggles to contain her natural desire to eat them. Victoria Hamilton-Barritt manages to bring a poignancy to this kiddie-eater, quite an achievement. This sub plot casts the piece into a darker dimension however and Ronder’s problem is that the piece teeters on the edge between fantasy and horror. This is definitely not one for the little ones.
