After picking up nine Sydney Theatre Awards, this bold and provocative
production is returning to Sydney. Alexander Berlage's staging
premiered at Hayes Theatre Co in May 2019, and will have its return
season at the Sydney Opera House in June 2020. Ben Gerrard will
reprise his role as Patrick Bateman alongside a company of new and
returning cast members. American Psycho , written by Bret Easton Ellis
(“ the thinking man’s shock jock ”) is brutal. A once-banned
novel that now has some currency as a social satire, it’s the story
of Patrick Bateman, an investment banker dripping in designer gear and
the blood of his victims. Yes, his life is so empty that he gets his
kick from brutal murder. His targets are largely women and their
deaths are sickening, but the male business rival who has a better
business card and the coveted Fisher account could also be getting the
actual axe. If you remember Bateman, you’re more likely to do so
because of the 2000 film, written by queer actor and writer Guinevere
Turner and directed by Mary Harron. The two massaged the empty cruelty
of the novel into commentary on toxic masculinity while skewering
Ellis’s clearer targets: American excess, narcissism and greed. The
sharpened satire of the film and the dreamy, near-mastubatory effect
of the book collide in American Psycho The Musical , which had a
successful run in London before bombing on Broadway. Written by
Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and with songs by Duncan Sheik, the show
struggled to find itself. The New York Times called the musical’s
tone “terminally undecided” – that it “suffer[ed] under the
weight of having to be a big Broadway musical.” A musical that
doesn’t know how to tell its story is a guaranteed flop. While you
can’t erase Ellis’ cruelty from the text – even now, in its
third iteration – you can mitigate, interrogate and subvert it.
Thank god, then, that in its Australian premiere, the musical has
landed in the hands of director Alexander Berlage and found a home at
the Hayes Theatre, an intimate playing space that affords directors
with the grace to explode a show and stitch it back together to
re-discover its soul. Berlage performed a similar spiritual surgery on
Cry-Baby last year at the Hayes, draining its excess sentimentality
and stitching it back up with queer anarchy to great acclaim. American
Psycho is only Berlage’s second musical (he’s also a lighting
designer, responsible for the cutting, heart-throbbing lighting track
for this show) but with it he cements his place as a talented surgeon:
slicing through unnecessary sentiment to get to the ugly but essential
beating heart of the piece. This is both critical and restorative
work. Take the moment when Bateman and a pal go to the Tunnel, a New
York City nightclub, to score cheap cocaine and get fucked up. The
Broadway musical played it dark and subdued – another example of
upper-class excess. But the Tunnel is an important landmark of queer
history and culture: RuPaul used to perform there around the time
American Psycho is set, and it was a landmark of the Club Kid era,
before the underground became commoditised. Berlage zeroes in on this
and reminds us that Bateman, and those like him, were invading and
desecrating queer spaces, harassing queer patrons and assuming
superiority over them – and this adds a new layer to Bateman’s
treatment of Luis (Liam Nunan), whose sexual advances leave him
uneasy. At the Tunnel, costume designer Mason Browne dresses his cast
in club-kid inspired costumes (there are direct visual references to
Leigh Bowery ) and Berlage stages snapshots from the queer dancefloor.
With just this scene, Berlage explodes American Psycho’s
name-dropping of a bygone era and repositions our view, giving it new
meaning. Ellis’ text is still violent and flawed and has an uneasy
relationship with itself, but Berlage throughout takes it down while
honouring whatever might still be valuable. The musical, under
Berlage, is more misanthropic than it is misogynist, and everything
deemed valuable onstage – looks, wealth, heterosexuality, capitalist
greed – is eventually cut down. Bateman (Ben Gerrard, relentlessly
tense and charismatic) stalks the stage that turns on a similarly
restless revolve. He is a monster of consumption. Aguirre-Sacasa’s
book makes some attempt to soften Bateman, but Gerrard bats those
moments away; we’re not asked to do the impossible and care for him
and the production is better for it. The cast is stacked with musical
theatre performers who are magnetic presences and strong actors: Blake
Appelqvist, Erin Clare, Shannon Dooley, Eric James Gravolin, Amy Hack,
Loren Hunter, Julian Kuo, Kristina McNamara, Liam Nunan and Daniel
Raso. While Aguirre-Sacasa’s book isn’t as good to women as it
thinks it is – all named female characters are underwritten and
two-dimensional – Berlage’s direction interrogates those choices.
Special mention must be made of Erin Clare, who turns a role riddled
with clichés – the recognisable ‘ditz’ – into something
that’s much closer to high art. The cast are all working under the
same comic time signatures, and the book moves at a cracking pace; the
dialogue is buzzy, even when it’s clunky, and the twist of irony
Berlage has threaded through their performances is always clear. This
rapid-fire treatment doesn’t just set a strong pace for us, but a
new pace for the musical itself. Musical director Andrew Worboys,
working via single sound design (there’s no live band), has created
new arrangements, and a sharper sonic landscape, than the original
cast recording. As a result, the show moves differently – and in
musicals, movement and the shape of music is everything. Sheik’s
score blends ‘80s pop hits with his own numbers; it’s more
atmospheric than plot-driven. It’s sonically overwhelming (on
opening night my seat vibrated in time with the bass) but in all the
right ways, and because the arrangements were written in response to
the voices in the rehearsal room, this is a rare score in Australian
musical theatre that, while not originated here, feels responsive to
its local cast. (Those voices are otherworldly – when the ensemble
rises and blends into a haunting cover of Phil Collins’ ‘In the
Air Tonight’, you might just get chills). In conversation with the
direction, design (that revolve, and the mirrored minimalist set, is
exactingly, smartly designed by Isabel Hudson) and Worboys’ bold
music is the choreography, and Yvette Lee has done astonishing work
here: every moment is a knife sluicing through the air, every step so
dripping in satire you could write a thesis on it. Berlage can’t
entirely fix the musical’s flaws: the character of Jean, Bateman’s
secretary, is so earnest she’s essentially constantly degraded
(though this production does its best to give her dignity), and the
book gets weaker as the show barrels towards its conclusion. And in
2019, this era still owns us (Bateman’s personal hero? Donald Trump)
so can we really attack it and laugh at it when we’re still in its
pocket? And these core fantasies of murdering women are hard to bear
in a country where 18 women have been killed by male violence this
year. But this is a remarkable attempt to turn American Psycho from
causing harm into a rejection of those who would revel in it.
They’ve even cut down the blood so you can’t get off on it. Ellis
would probably hate it. Thank god.
3056
Views
05/06/2020 Last update