42 Balloons musical review – a soaring success

New musicals aren’t easy to get off the ground. The originality of the characters, the imagination of the storyline, the weightlessness of the songs can all prevent them taking flight. Jack Godfrey’s 42 Balloons has a real, remarkable story where disbelief is literally suspended: a flock of balloons that carried a lawn chair and its owner up into the sky.

Why Larry Walters chose to do so is a question the show repeatedly asks – and one it avoids answering. It glides over the precipitating context of Larry failing the Air Force’s eye test during the Vietnam war, and dilutes motivation to generic schmaltz around following “a stupid dream”. Although he gets a triumphant rocky number where he dons a leather jacket, sunglasses and microphone into which he screams “Nothing’s stopping him now”, the show is more interested in the ‘how’ and desperate to reach the climactic take-off.

The crisply simple structure follows the ascent in the first half and the descent in the second. It reaches peak altitude early, with highlights like Gillian Hardie as Carol’s Mom, her disdain so acidic that her lips purse as she sings about her daughter’s boyfriend being a “loser”.

The show’s twee zaniness is nicely leavened by a puckish metatheatrical self-awareness. Characters refer to themselves in the third person, pulling out of the action to remind us how surreal the story is. The ensemble becomes a quasi-Greek chorus of fact-checkers who encourage us to research the plot twists after the show, and call out the scientific exposition as a “math montage”.

It begins to deflate during the second half – and it’s a bumpy descent, breezily rattling through Larry’s sense of emptiness, fame and the implications of both for his relationship. But the show soars in its wonderful quieter, stiller moments. The flight evokes his excitement and anxiety with notes that undulate like the wind in “The world goes down, Larry goes up”. There’s an entrancing tranquility as he cruises at 6,000 feet – piano gently tinkling, azure horizon gently rolling – that also creates ambiguity over his fulfillment.

Charlie McCullagh is particularly good when he leans into Larry’s lack of likability, as a man doggedly chasing something for himself at the expense of everyone else. A blind selfishness manifests in his almost snarling final song, face and fists clenched. The show’s keenness to redeem him treats Carol as he did by neglecting her sacrifice. Evelyn Hoskins’ flat expressions and deadpan delivery amusingly undermine his delusionality, and she’s given a strong ballad where she asserts “I was your helium”, but the book could give more of a sense of her own aspirations that she had to sideline.

Milla Clarke’s dazzling design uses the template of Es Devlin’s bowl-shaped concave walls from Ugly Lies the Bone. Andrzej Goulding’s projections wrap around behind Larry to swaddle him in his obsessive dream, often showing enormous grinning shadows of himself that capture his monomania. They also appear as a great wave that swallows Carol in her boyfriend’s reckless fantasy when she’s alone on stage. At other times, that curvature and similar pale colour to the balloons make it seem like we’re inside them – a prison cell.

There are subtler effects, too, that create scale and height. The raised stage allows McCullagh to peer down at the audience as though floating above us, overhead cameras reinforce the perspective, and the cast momentarily levitate on tiny ledges. When this inventive show keeps its head out of the clouds, it sails above conventional musicals. Several thousand feet above them.