Venture out on your own, and Wizard will unleash The Sound Check, which will bust your eardrums!Īnd I haven’t even mentioned yet that Berger, Mancina and Doyle have deemed that the same actor, John Hickok, should play both Wizard and Lyla’s Father (and at one early point, also Lewis’s father, or manager, or something?). It’s also here that other members of the Collective (read: the ensemble) warn August/Evan that Wizard has a vaguely wizardly tool to keep them all in check, lest they try to leave the group. Rich Warbeast, a guitar that Tipper Gore would doubtless recognize as an instrument of heavy-metal darkness. So they turn Wizard into a devil: Here, he’s a sort of cult leader of a group of homeless, possibly tunnel-dwelling buskers, referred to as The Collective.Īfter he’s adopted young August into the Collective, we get our first hint that he might be evil when he appears playing a fire-red B.C. Robin Wizard Bono gives young Evan his new stage name, August Rush, and seems to be basically benevolent even if he does capitalize on his new protege’s impressive talents.Īdapters Mark Mancina, who composed the film’s music, and Glen Berger, the playwright who wrote a tell-all about his time served on the disastrous Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, seem to have determined that the feel-good movie’s shortage of villains is a problem. In the movie, the Wizard is portrayed by Robin Williams cosplaying as Bono. Now here’s where August Rush: The Musical begins to deviate from the screenplay. Running toward what? New York City, where he was conceived, and where, we’re told through some awkward ensemble narration, he’s “fixated on the city’s tolerance for buskers.” That’s right, our boy is obsessed with street musicians, and he soon falls in with a crew of them, led by a Fagin-like figure who calls himself the Wizard. Given the name Evan, the boy (played on opening night Friday by Jack McCarthy of Broadway’s Finding Neverland, alternating performances with Huxley Westemeier) repeatedly runs away from orphanages and foster homes, though he prefers to call it “running toward.” The baby did, of course, and at the top of the show he tells us “I believe in music the way some people believe in fairy tales”-a line that also opened the movie’s trailer, so we know we should treat it as a thesis even though it means absolutely nothing. In one of the movie’s biggest logical leaps, preserved here on stage, her father forges her signature on adoption papers after she goes into premature labor, and then tells his daughter that the baby didn’t survive. Lyla’s uptight dad forbids the lovers-at-first-sight to see one another again and insists she give up the baby. He’s the product of a rooftop tryst between rocker Lewis (George Abud here, taking over Jonathan Rhys Meyers’s film role) and sheltered classical musician Lyla (Sydney Shepherd, subbing in for Keri Russell). In this August Rush, as in the movie, the title character is an 11-year-old boy who’s never known his parents, and whose parents don’t know he exists. (Ah, remember when white nationalism was such a fringe concern that Whoopi Goldberg could produce a silly musical about it?) It might be the most misguided “pre-Broadway tryout” I’ve seen in Chicago since White Noise. And in its current shapeless form, it’s hard to imagine August Rush making that move. We see our fair share of them in Chicago. It’s essentially an out-of-town tryout, the kind of production that producers and marketers want you to think of as “Broadway-bound.”īut then plenty of big new musicals that describe themselves as Broadway-bound never make it there. ![]() The new musical, based on a modest, mawkish 2007 movie that starred a young Freddie Highmore as an orphaned musical prodigy determined to find his parents, comes to Aurora with commercial backing, a cast of New York–based actors, and direction by Tony winner John Doyle. And having done so, we might suspect Signature saw the writing on the wall. That means Chicago-area audiences are getting the first public look at August Rush. By the time Signature announced its full 2018–2019 season two months later, though, it had dropped its commitment to the show, citing scheduling issues. ![]() When it was first announced in February of 2018, the world premiere of August Rush: The Musical was to be a co-production between Virginia’s Signature Theatre and Aurora’s Paramount, bowing first in Arlington before transferring here.
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