I love scrappy theatre. I love low budget theatre. I love a theater where a group of individuals take a script and make something out of so very little. Don’t get me wrong, I love the glitz and glamor and awe of a high budget show as well. But there’s just something magical about having to create something with nothing. Making the script and the acting speak for itself. Having to reach a new level of creativity due to the budget or space you’re working with. So needless to say I was really excited to see some Fringe theatre in London.
I had the opportunity to see two Fringe shows in London, The Mad Ones and Plied and Prejudice. I have been trying to hunt down a production of The Mad Ones for a very long time. In 2015 I discovered the first iteration of the show which was then titled The Unauthorized Autobiography of Samantha Brown. I heard a song “Run Away With Me” from the show that Aaron Tveit had sung in his 54 Below concert. I loved it, fell down the rabbit hole and found Kerrigan and Lowdermilk’s incredible story of friendship and loss. I lost a very dear friend when I was in middle school and the story became unbelievably healing for me. The story in both iterations revolves around Samantha Brown on the morning she is supposed to set off for college, but she finds herself stuck. She can’t decide if she wants to go to college at all, or if she wants to spend some time finding herself or what the hell she wants to do with her life. But she’s frozen in her driveway, until the ghost of her recently deceased friend, Kelly shows up. Kelly takes Sam back through her senior year to process the hurt, grief, and loss that she’s struggling with to help her find her next steps in life. From beyond the grave Kelly wills Samantha to carve her own path, to follow her own intuition and to build a life that she wants for herself, not what her parents or her boyfriend want for her. In 2018 Kerrigan and Lowdermilk workshopped the musical again and renamed it The Mad Ones. It isn’t much different, minor changes such as Sam and Kelly being in the same grade, in Unauthorized Kelly was a year older and had already left Sam behind for college. In the first iteration there was a 5 person cast, Sam, Kelly, Sam’s boyfriend Adam, Sam’s mom, and her dad. In the latest iteration it is a four hander, cutting Sam’s dad out of the musical completely.
When the opportunity to see The Mad Ones at The Other Palace Theater came up, I was nervous to see it. Not only because of the subject matter being so personal to me, but also because a script and story I loved so much, with music that sometimes feels like it was written just for me, but also putting that precious experience of seeing it onstage for the first time in the hands of a theater company I knew nothing about. Would they take care of the story? Would it be as exquisite and cathartic and necessary as the first time I ever listened to the cast recording? It’s a lot of pressure to put on a group of strangers for sure.
When we got to theater, we were led down three flights of stairs into their basement studio space. The space was tiny, the rows of chairs were so closely packed to each other that to move through a row you had to move the chairs out of the way. A triangular shaped stage thrust into the audience, with nothing but the front half of a car sitting a top it. The back wall of the stage was shattered glass, knowing the script already I knew it emulated the windshield of the car that hit and killed Kelly. It was haunting, but strange to know the secret as everyone in the audience speculated about the interesting design choice.
As far as the acting and singing go, the performance was immaculate. It was everything I had hoped it would be. I was a wreck the entirety of act 2. It was this massively cathartic experience that I didn’t know that I needed until this show gifted it to me. The way the actors used the music to heighten their storytelling had me taking notes in my phone for my upcoming directorial musical debut. The only complaint I had, was the lighting. Dear god was it dark. At climax of songs we would have characters in the absolute dark belting their faces off. It wasn’t as if the actor had just gone rogue and was standing outside of their light, the light was just simply not there. There were a few moments I had to fight to stay invested in the story and the world of the play because the lack of lighting kept trying to take me out. What is also true, is in those moments the actors always brought me back in. Even if the lighting was working against them, they were strong enough storytellers that they were always able to reel me back in.
I’ve been thinking about this show since we saw it on May 25th. It has healed me in places that I didn’t realize were so hurt. Losing a friend at a young age and facing your own mortality when the rest of your peers are reveling in childhood invincibility is one of the hardest things I have done in my life. Having a show like The Mad Ones made me feel seen and understood in ways I don’t often feel when I think about that time in my life. At one point in the show I heard Taylor’s laughter in my head urging me forward, letting me know that she was loving watching me go on, and that I never moved on without her. She’s just in the other room waiting for me to knock on her door when it’s my time.
Theatre in London U of A 