Whisper House at The Other Palace

JGBlunners, given where you say you were sitting, I think I was sitting next to you, moaning to you about how much I was missing the musical "I Can't Sing", which also featured the superb Simons Lipkin and Bailey, except unhindered by this monotone moroseness. I was grumbling about the song list in the programme, which showed that the two ghosts (Simon Bailey and Naimh Perry) got almost all the songs, and you were egging me on by pointing out that the one song with the most grimly teenage title, "Better to be Dead," got four reprises. Upon which, I started singing the praises of the marvellous "American Psycho" musical, which led me to buy the ticket to this in the first place via the Duncan Sheik connection, upon which the American lady on my left and I got into a discussion about how much I felt that it was wrong to cut the song "Oh Sri Lanka" from the show for Broadway.

I think that must have been you, as my seat was front row, centre adjacent, and I'd agree the view was excellent, and the multi-tiered round lighthouse deck design is quite awesome to behold.

Some spoilers follow. . .

This show is one for adventurers and completists, who have already seen all the 4 star shows in town, and are looking for something that bit different, even if the things that are different have a tendency to sink the drama. The ghosts are sirens, peripheral to the main action, who seek to convince everyone involved in the show to end themselves. The songs they sing are samey, designed to depress the listener, with one being the exact same song sung five times (mentioned above). The songs sound to me like the bridge to grungy Nirvana numbers, with the proviso that just as you are about to rock out, the song stops, lest you accidentally get excited.

Ironically, the one superb rock out song, "Take A Bow" is omitted from the programme and the show, and is performed AFTER the bows, in order to energise the audience to get up and leave, following the downbeat torpor of the main show. Simon Bailey and Niamh Perry perform it superbly, though I'm not surprised, as Bailey was the lynchpin of an awesome final London Jersey Boys line up, and Niamh Perry owned that Ben Elton show "The Beautiful Game" at the Union Theatre!

In the main body of the show, Simon Lipkin is an invaluable boon, as his irrepressible vivacity brings humour to the character of the Sheriff, who moves the main plot, by pursuing the US wartime policy of the day, persecuting Japanese residents. Lipkin performs the heck out of his one number, "The Tale of Solomon Snell," a rare song not performed by the Greek chorus of the 2 Ghosts. Poor Nicholas Goh, as said persecuted Japanese resident, gets no songs at all!

Beneath the siren songs of misery, two good dramas struggle to surface, one pertaining to Nicholas Goh's Yasuhiro's struggle against institutionalised xenophobia (very topical) and the other concerning the naivety of a judgemental child (which drama recalls the much more engaging "The Go Between" at the Apollo). That the cast make us feel a little something for these underwritten characters, involved in these two dramatic situations, over the wailing of the ghosts, is to the company's credit.

Strangely, I don't regret seeing this show, as seeing a show that dares to be different, even when it fails to work dramatically, is always interesting, and with performers like Lipkin, Bailey and Perry to watch, you at least get some blood out of a stingy stone of a musical.

3 stars.