TThe Musical of the IM Firth features a family meltdown on a Soggy Camping Holiday. First Premiering in 2013, its domestic fallouts may be a related fare to set in the song before. But everything seems to be rather soft and cuddly in its comedy today.
Family members are slightly identified in their habits: an adult father (Michael Jibson) who has performed free of charge and never reads instructions for his DIY winner; A put-onon mother (Gemma Whelan) who felt her marriage hit an iceberg; A bossy grandmother (gay soper) showing signs of dementia and a wacky aunt decked out of animal-print (Victoria Elliott) undergoing a mid-life sexual awakening.
Also, most importantly, 13-year-old Nicky (Nancy Allsop), the youngest of family and sister to stroppy teen Matt (Luke Lambert). She is our narrator of singing, desperate to unite parts of family life without control and away from each other. At that point, he was writing a kind of essay fulfillment in his “perfect family” that won him a holiday. He chooses camping, in the woods where his parents are known as teenagers, to bring them back to the beginning.
Directed by Vicky Featherstone, they came out of what looks like a giant doll house, as if to send Nicky’s “perfect family”. The woods in which they camped – Set designer Chloe Lamford – was beautifully evoked by Evoked the enchanted quality of Arden’s Shakespeare forest. There is no magic but comic shenanigans and internal changes that are sweet, if predicted. All the family and sadness are conveniently mmotled and resolved by the end.
The song is what raised the musical above a TV comedy. The characters confess within chaos or sadness in tone, set against a delicate harp and cellos. They also sing lines over and over again, to mirrors the crossed emotional wires between them. Whelan’s numbers keep up with humor, AllSop has a very beautiful singing voice, and some choral numbers are sinking. This family-a paragon of the central emotional repression-becomes open-hearted and weak when they sing. It’s a twee, and it’s a bit slow to go there, but the happy ending is melting your heart.
