Elegant chamber musical Catch Me receives the digital remedy with this sensitively conceived manufacturing
“Why wasn’t I OK?”
First carried out within the intimate studio house above the Arts Theatre in 2016, Arnoud Breitbarth and Christian Czornyj’s musical Catch Me now receives additional life with this digital model which might be streamed through Theatrical Solutions. Recent advances in theatre streaming have been vastly useful in rising entry however given the sensitivity of the subject material at hand right here, there’s additionally an acknowledgement that one is likely to be extra comfy viewing some materials within the privateness of 1’s dwelling.
For Catch Me is ready on eve of a funeral, and 5 of Dean’s shut ones have gathered to try to make sense, if any might be discovered, of his demise by suicide. But although this musical tackles problems with poisonous masculinity and misogyny and contains frank discussions of psychological sickness, it does so in a significant and empathetic means. Even when Dean himself seems as a personality within the second act, it’s absolutely in service of telling a extra rounded model of his story, to not sensationalise or scandalise.
We begin in the lounge of Sarah (Molly Lynch), Dean’s fiancée and shortly meet his greatest good friend Harry (Cleve September), sister Christine (Jorien Zeevaart), sister-in-law Anna (Amy Parker) and colleague Marc (James Hameed). And as they wrestle to course of their collective loss and but additionally recalling happier recollections, all of them work by means of emotions of grief and anger and even guilt at not realising the depth of Dean’s despair, how severe his points had been.
Adam Lenson’s path clearly advantages from his digital expertise. Rehearsed and staged as a bit of theatre after which subsequently filmed dwell in a single take, the present finds the perfect of this hybrid type. It actually is an ensemble piece at first and although everybody will get their second, each musically and emotionally (generally on the similar time), there’s a stream within the script and rating that brings an unerring sense of integrity to the present, guided expertly by Tamara Saringer’s musical path.
And as Oli Higginson arrives as Dean, achingly poignant as he says what he might by no means say to these he beloved or struggles nonetheless to seek out the phrases, there’s a clear-sighted recognition that it is a topic the place there are so hardly ever any straightforward solutions. Mental well being issues might be troublesome for others to identify, they are often arduous for individuals to know in themselves, and Catch Me by no means undersells that whereas developing this elegant chamber musical round these points.