STAGE WEST: Backyard Renaissance Theatre's "The Rise and Fall of Little Voice"

Megan Carmitchel and Francis Gercke in "The Rise and Fall of Little Voice."           Photo by Daren Scott

            What’s most remarkable about Megan Carmitchel’s performance in Backyard Renaissance Theatre’s “The Rise and Fall of Little Voice” is that her singing interpretations of Judy Garland, Billie Holiday, Marilyn Monroe, Julie Andrews and more are not music-hall impersonations. It’s her capturing of these women's vocal styling, their phrasing, their emotion that we hear when the introverted young woman called “LV” brings to life the songs she’s been listening to from her dead father’s record collection.
             Carmitchel is an established musical theater standout (i.e. “Cabaret” and “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812” at Cygnet, “Fiddler on the Roof” and “The Wedding Singer” at Moonlight, “Alice” at Lamb’s Players, among others). The starring role in Jim Cartwright’s “Little Voice” requires a voice, an ear and perhaps most important versatility and intuition. It’s essential to the script’s believability ask, that this introverted, agoraphobic British woman self-sequestered upstairs in a train wreck of a household can not only sound like the singers on her father’s records but inhabit them.
            Carmitchel does, and that’s what elevates this production in every way.
            “The Rise and Fall of Little Voice” premiered at London’s Royal National Theatre in 1992 with Sam Mendes directing and Jane Horrocks (“Absolutely Fabulous”) starring. (A revival of the play is scheduled to return there in December.) Horrocks later reprised her LV in a 1998 film.
            Backyard’s is the play’s San Diego debut. Directed by Anthony Methvin, it’s part loud, dark comedy, part quiet, gripping drama. It delivers a horrifyingly funny look at a working-class house boozily “overseen” by LV’s staggering mother Mari (Jessica John), the shady, manipulative boyfriend and promoter Ray Say (Francis Gercke), and a cheap nightclub run by a blustering Mr. Boo (Daren Scott). At the same time, the raucousness and depravity are stopped dead in their tracks – and an audience will go silent – when LV begins to sing a capella and a la Judy Garland in her lonely bedroom “The Man That Got Away.”
            When Ray Say’s wild romancing of Mari – played to the hilarious physical hilt – is interrupted by such a sound from upstairs, an idea is instantly hatched: There’s money in LV’s uncanny talent. This leads to one failed, reluctant “performance” at Mr. Boo’s club, then another that is the play’s – and the production’s – most thrilling.
            But LV is like a little songbird with a bent wing yanked out of the nest. Remember the title: “The Rise and Fall …”
            So disreputable are her mother, her unwanted promoter and the crude Mr. Boo that LV is not just exploited, she’s victimized. It’s that intuition of Carmitchel’s again, this time without singing, that conveys in stares, silences and benumbed words the trauma of being used, the distance from a mother who’s one of the prime users, and in her mind an abandonment of the depth of feeling in her father’s records.
            The only light in her life is a young man, Billy (Layth Haddad), an introvert in his own way who is charmed by LV not because of her special talent but because of who she is. He sees her not as a commodity but as a person. This relationship is overplayed in “The Rise and Fall,” however, and the metaphor of the lamplight Billy shines on and for LV is strained.
            Downstairs in the Hoff house is total booze-infused mayhem -- shouting, carousing and then some. Jessica John’s Mari is the personification of all of the above. I generally don’t find drunks funny, but her barely controlled chaos mostly is. Take when she’s at a table, crazily spraying her hair with one hand, swigging from a bottle with the other. “Lacquer … liquor, lacquer … liquor!” she exhorts, alternating the two.
            Gercke’s Ray Say is more calculating. He has to be to make us buy that the reclusive LV would submit to his scheming. Mari may be out of control; Ray, using a sensitive side, has a method to his madness.
            Scott plays to the crowd – the unseen one and the Backyard audience – when emceeing at Mr. Boo’s dive, while Teri Brown is Sadie, the strange sounding board for friend Mari’s rants.
            As always with Backyard Renaissance, Yi-Chien Lee has designed a split-level set that credibly separates mother Mari’s outrageous world below from daughter LV’s private one above. Bird-cage lamps suspended from the rafters hint at the confined person beneath them.
            “The Rise and Fall of Little Voice” is set in North Yorkshire, England, and the accents here not a distraction which is the most I hope for when American actors go British. The musical sequences directed by Taylor Peckham and arranged by Evan Hart Marsh are at just the right volume. The fills in between action, recordings such as Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man,” are atmospheric reminders of LV’s father’s collection, affection for which she has no bounds.
            With all its downstairs noise the poignancy of “The Rise and Fall of Little Voice” upstairs echoes from the heart of the play, at times when one least expects it. It was Tolstoy who said that “Music is the shorthand of emotion.” It is LV’s shorthand – and her lifeline.
            “The Rise and Fall of Little Voice” runs through July 3 at the Tenth Avenue Arts Center, downtown.