SNAP!

Kings Head Theatre • 13th May - 25th May

When I got word that David O’Brien’s new musical ‘SNAP!’ was based on the “glamorous yet cut throat world of photography”, itself becoming the backdrop to a “tangled web of ambition, passion, and deception”, I was actually quite excited given that the other string to my own particular bow just happens to be that of photographer, and as such I can more often than not be found behind a camera doing that thing that photographers do in the, hopefully not quite so cut throat, world of photography… but I had still braced myself for the possibility of being shown a few uncomfortable home truths about the industry and my profession.

Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, in a musical that seldom seemed to take itself particularly seriously, this production was ultimately left with nothing particularly interesting to say about any of it, and despite having teased us with the promise of a “high-stakes game of manipulation”, what we actually got was a fairly uneven musical that ultimately failed to find its own voice.

The opening number introduces us to Max, (Matteo Giambias) the photographer in question, whose passion we are soon to discover goes well beyond just capturing the beauty of glamorous women in his search of the perfect image but, as the music begins and Giambias takes to the stage, he begins to rather strangely gesticulate his way through the first song like a cross between Freddie Mercury and a silent movie villain, which might have been fine had I been sitting in row XX at the O2 arena, but in the more compact setting of the Kings Head Theatre I found the performance pitched way to large for such an intimate venue, the net result being that, for me at least, Max came across as a fairly camp character which undermined any possibility of him being the ‘player’ with the opposite sex. Had director Jack Storm managed to reign-in Giambias’s more exuberant movements, Max could well have ended up being the villain of the piece he was clearly intended to be, but this was all but lost amongst the flailing hands and dramatic twirls which, even for a musical, felt absurdly exaggerated.

As the story unfolds Max finds that, having won a new campaign to reposition tea as a more desirable, and ‘sexy’ commodity, (yes, tea!), he uses the opportunity to separate his former girlfriend Angela (Hayley Maybury) from her partner Tom (Will Usherwood-Bliss) by casting one of them as the face of this new campaign. Much to the surprise of his long suffering assistant, Sheila, (Justine Maire Mead), it’s Tom who he casts in the campaign despite having previously built a career focusing his camera on any number of glamorous women. “I did not see that coming”, Sheila proclaims who, having surprisingly (and equally unbelievably) held a candle for her charmless boss for quite some time, had no idea why he had made such a creative u-turn. For my part, I found myself being more surprised that the whole scenario hadn’t been set up in order for him to make a rather more sexual u-turn, everything in my mind having seemingly been building up to Max creating an opportunity to seduce the rather more hapless Tom instead. So convinced was I by this being the direction of travel that when he finally manages to manipulate his way into Angela’s bed I actually found myself repeating Sheila’s own words under my breathe… “I did not see that coming!”

The genuine, and more intended surprise is that Tom, pumped up on adrenaline after a successful first photo shoot, finds himself in bed with Sheila, although neither one had really been given sufficient motivation in the lead-up to make this moment anything other than a convenient, rather than credible, device for O’Brien to drive his story forward. Even less credible is the speed at which both Angela and Tom’s infidelities are forgiven, which is just about as quickly as they began. Had this musical been played in the tradition of a farce, such underdeveloped bed-hopping would have been par for the course, but without providing the foundations to enable the story to flourish in a more meaningful, or even particularly believable way, both writer and director sadly fail to find the much more engaging musical hidden within.

All of which is a shame as I found the musical was at its best during it’s all to rare subtler moments, an early piece of story development between Sheila and Tom being one such moment, and a confrontation between Sheila and Angela being another, both showing interesting glimpses of what might have been, but ended up as avenues of real drama that were allowed to fall by the wayside, the conflicting acting and directing styles throughout ultimately detracting from, rather than enhancing the end result.

Musically, (has it really taken me this long to get to the music in a review about a musical), this could almost be said to be the productions strongest point, (apart from a rather awkward, elongated piano solo half way through the production that left the audience staring at an empty stage for what felt like an age, itself not being helped by the somewhat lack-lustre lighting design throughout). Despite there being a few forced rhymes in the lyrics that didn’t really work, there wasn’t anything that couldn’t have been fixed had SNAP! just managed to find its overall stylistic identity and then stuck with it.

★★

review: Simon J. Webb

photography: Stuart Yeatman