Review: Metropolis challenges what a musical can be
Written and directed by Julia Robertson, music and orchestrations by Zara Stanton, produced by Little Eggs Collective
Review by Charlotte Smee
A dystopian musical seems like it should be a contradiction. Despite that, a few exist: Urinetown, a comedic take on a world where peeing doesn’t come free (staged earlier this year by Heartstrings Theatre Co at the Hayes Theatre), and the somewhat cringe jukebox musical We Will Rock You, set in a future “GaGa” world where the Bohemians live underground and rebel against heartless computer-generated music, are just two of them.
Julia Robertson and Zara Stanton’s Metropolis is a brand-new, Australian dystopian musical. Based on the incredibly influential silent film by Fritz Lang, and the earlier book written by his wife Thea von Harbou, this dystopia takes the form of a towering city “a hundred years hence” from 1927. White silk-wearing boys and beautiful women live in the heights of Metropolis, while blue linen-wearing workers from the depths are “fed” to the city to keep her running. Joh Frederson (Joshua Robson) is the Master of Metropolis, and he presses the button that makes her scream out in hunger, signalling a shift change. Then, the hauntingly beautiful Maria (Shannen Alyce Quan) brings some of the underlings up to the surface and shatters white silk-wearing Freder’s (Tom Dawson) worldview. All of a sudden, the perfect son of the Master wants a taste of the underworld.
Along the way, Freder switches places with blue linen Georgi (Tomas Parrish) and grants him the freedom of “enough money in his pockets”. Frederson visits the inventor Rotwang (Thomas Campbell) who, despite instructions to make a male robot army, has created “Futura”, a female robot who is eerily elegant and as yet lacks a face.
A lot is going on in this story, and the musical version attempts to bring “colour and nuance” to the black-and-white melodrama of the source material. Visually and aurally, it’s as brilliant and innovative as the film version was. Set and puppet design by Nick Fry is grandiose, and effective, with a back wall full of Edison light bulbs hidden behind art deco doors in rusty browns. On either side of those doors are two beautiful stained-glass-esque windows lit from behind in various colours, including a very appropriate mint green and dark reds (thanks to lighting designer Ryan MacDonald).
The design, and feel, of this Metropolis are distinctly steampunk: Robot Maria or Futura is made of what looks like copper, with visible screws, and the warm Edison light bulbs suggest an alternative to blinking LEDs or cold white light. More than just an aesthetic, steampunk is inspired by early Victorian steam-powered technology, and envisions an alternative future where we never moved on to other forms of technology. The Victorian era and the Industrial Revolution were ones of rampant classism and unprecedented growth, and choosing to use these aesthetics draws parallels between that era and our own: even though this future might look different, has anything really changed?
Choreography by Robertson (and the company) is similarly excellent, with pleasingly angular movement sequences that make the workers seem like machines. Stanton’s music is texturally rich, despite being played only using keys, clarinet, accordion, trumpet and cello, and evokes the dystopian vibe of Metropolis very well with chromatic and otherwise not-so-diatonic themes throughout. The best songs brought emotional depth to the broadness of the novel and the film and had moments of thick choral harmonies that cut right through to your cold, capitalist heart.
The complexity and muddiness of the novel and the film, unfortunately, carry through to the musical version. Influential texts often aren’t particularly excellent themselves, with big ideas and concerns that are taken and developed by later creators (in this instance, Blade Runner, The Fifth Element, and Star Wars, among others). H. G. Wells called the film “immensely and strangely dull” when it first premiered, but Roger Ebert later praised it as “one of the great achievements of the silent era”. It suffers from the same thing a lot of early science fiction suffers from; being an overall lengthy, heavy-going and confusing experience. It’s the kind of film/novel/musical that needs a different lens to view it through, one that allows you to see the characters as metaphors more than actual people, or allows you to forgive a little clunky storytelling in favour of a vision of something new.
The trouble with, or perhaps the cool thing, about adapting very old texts into new theatrical forms is that they are staged well after they were initially released, which can make them difficult to translate. Despite that, Metropolis the musical is exciting, unapologetically dark, and consistent in a lot of ways that count. It pushes the boundaries of what a musical can be – and that alone is a mammoth effort worth applauding.
Metropolis plays at the Hayes Theatre Co until May 2023. Find tickets here.
Images by Grant Leslie
Charlotte is the editor of Kaleidoscope Arts Journal, a little enby and a big mess. Their friends regularly worry that they might overdose on theatre.
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