Fly More Than You Fall musical at Southwark Playhouse Elephant – review

Sentimentality and raw emotion are not the same thing, and this well-meaning but confused new American tuner repeatedly blurs the distinction between the two. Fly More Than You Fall aims to be the feel-good musical about grief you never knew you needed, but mostly comes across as having an identity problem bigger than its (admittedly) sensitive heart.

Eric Holmes’s book tells of 15-year-old fiction writer Malia (terrifically played by Robyn Rose-Li) whose world is shattered by the premature death of her mother Jennifer (The Greatest Showman’s Keala Settle, belting ear-splittingly through her character’s terminal cancer diagnosis). This is spliced together with a story that Malia is working on about a pair of flightless birds (Maddison Bulleyment and Edward Chitticks, singing their hearts out while improbably attired like a pair of holiday camp fitness instructors) working their way up a treacherous mountain. Clearly this is supposed to be a metaphor but it mostly just deflects focus from the real core of the piece, and the whole thing gets wrapped up way too neatly in a tsunami of platitudinous power ballads and unearned emotion. The reveal of Jennifer’s illness comes too early in the show for us as an audience to have formed an emotional connection with her, so the first half feels more mawkish than tragic, although there’s a rather beautiful quartet for Malia’s real-life parents and her avian protagonists.

Holmes has collaborated on the lyrics with composer Nat Zegree, and perhaps the best that can be said about those is that they certainly rhyme, though most would not look out of place in the centre of one of those schmalzy Hallmark “In Deepest Sympathy” cards. Zegree’s music is better, drawing on pop and folk influences sometimes sounding reminiscent of Sara Bareilles’s work on Waitress or Tom Kitt’s on Next to Normal, although seldom as memorable. The latter show in particular demonstrated that musical theatre can deal devastatingly with loss and pain, so it’s frustrating that this piece seems content to marinate in syrupy clichés, rushed plotting and muddled character motivations.

It also doesn’t help that Christian Durham’s production plays out on pastel-coloured scenery by Stewart J Charlesworth, all ice cream pink, peppermint green, wan yellow and baby blue, which typifies the scrambled nature of this musical’s ambitions. On the one hand, the multi-levels and expansive panels evoke the bird wings and mountain tops of Malia’s imagination while also looking like the scattered pages of a teen’s notebook, but on the other, it constantly resembles the set of a TV programme for pre-schoolers, unfortunately, which is a drawback when the show attempts to grapple with serious heartfelt emotions. The visuals seem to actively work against what the script and score are trying to tell us.

Despite all this, the cast is excellent. It’s impossible not to care about Rose-Li’s likeable Malia, and Cavin Cornwall gets a lot of genuine feeling out of the underwritten role of her grief-stricken dad. Settle is underused but gets to unleash her distinctive, rangy instrument on some corking vocal riffs and runs, while Bulleyment’s valiant fictional bird sounds absolutely gorgeous. Apart from Rose-Li, the performance of the night comes from Max Gill as Caleb, the sassy but staunch friend Malia meets at writing camp. Gill is a sensation, finding a rich vein of kindness and lived hurt beneath their character’s mouthy, flamboyant exterior, undeniably aided by the most punchy and textured writing in the script. The ensemble bring energy to Heather Douglas’s angular choreography and field fine voices.

There’s no question that Fly More Than You Fall’s heart is in the right place, and the onstage talent is consistently first-rate. It’s just a shame that ultimately the show barely scratches the surface of the uncertainties of the teenage years, or the effect of losing a beloved parent, and only flirts with the vicissitudes of the creative process, and the power of escapism. It’s merely watchable when it could be searing, and bombastic when it ought to be delicate. There’s possibly a really satisfying and insightful tearjerker bursting to get out of this musical, but it will take several more drafts to uncover it.