ALW’s Whistle Down The Wind - Watermill Newbury

Did the opposite for me. Had been looking into whether I could afford a trip to Newbury, but that trailer has saved me the expense.

My daughter was doing work experience there last week, so I had several days of collecting her and listening in the car park to the singing. What I heard sounded pretty fantastic!

Is anyone from these boards going to see this? WDTW is one that I'm most disappointed has never had a real run here in the US and that I've really wanted to see

Agree, I like the idea of going blue grass in theory, but the show was written with a very rock sound. Some songs should work OK but Tyre Tracks (a personal favourite) I just can't see working.

Also, these gushy luvvy (for want of a better word) trailers i just find a bit cringe and off putting

Maybe some of the cast also play electric guitars?

I'm there on Saturday for the matinee!

Definitely the blandest of his bland scores, with some godawful lyrics to go. Resetting the story in the USA added nothing but awful accents, and the naivety of the aged up Swallow just makes her look dim. (Best use of cello in an actor musician production was Craig Revile Horror's Chess where they all fell over as Freddie threw the Chess game. Nothing to do with playing, but it looked dramatic.)

I think I would quite like it. The show is very dear to my heart. But yes, the young actors playing grown adult roles feels odd.

Well, I made it out to the Watermill tonight for this. Had definitely been looking forward to it, as I have a soft spot for the show and think certain sections - especially the last 15 mins or so of each act, as well as songs like the Soliloquy and A Kiss is a Terrible Thing to Waste - are extremely dramatic and compelling. I've been hoping for several years that someone really innovative and smart would revive this and do something special with it.

Unfortunately, this isn't that production. Certain choices were made by the director/choreographer that I think highlight the weaknesses in the material - particularly the quite unfocussed stop/start nature of the first act and the lack of real psychological insight into the characters.

What stood out for me were a lot of (in fact, pretty much all of) the performances - especially Robert Tripolino, who was magnetic and unhinged as The Man, and Lydia White, who seemed equally unhinged and damaged as Swallow. Unfortunately, The Man is a fairly secondary character, so Tripolino rarely got the chance to show what he was capable of, and White just seemed about five years too old for Swallow, which just felt really odd. But both sang their guts out, and were extremely compelling. I wish they'd had the production their performances deserved.

What didn't work... well, first of all, the show just doesn't suit the Watermill's stage. It's a show of wide skies and huge emotions, and it lost all atmosphere and yearning in such a tiny space. We felt like we were inside the barn the entire time. It was claustrophobic and dull to look at.

I love the Watermill so much, but this is the wrong show for it. Possibly a radical re-interpretation would have worked better (if, for example, it was all happening in Swallow's head as she had a mental breakdown brought on through grief). There were actually hints of that here, through some rather strikingly strange choreography, but if that's what they were going for then the production didn't have the courage to commit, so it just ended up being an awkward mishmash of naturalism with some stylised stuff sitting on top. This just made it feel a bit like a student production that was trying to be clever.

Even worse, and this was utterly unforgivable, was the awful nails-on-a-black board out of tune playing. I'm not going to single anyone out, but there were several people who weren't anywhere near good enough on their instruments. It really sounded like an amateur production at times, and was totally unlistenable. There were moments when it came together okay - especially the more rock parts of the score - but whenever it needed subtlety, or a big lush orchestral sound, it was all over the place.

I don't blame the performers. It's a tough call being cast in an actor-musician show. You need people who can act, sing, dance and play at least one instrument, memorising an entire script and instrumental score - and are right for the part. How many people are there who can tick all those boxes? But honestly, we need to stop with these actor musician shows if casting directors can't cast them to a sufficiently high standard, because it just ruins everything. This was by far the worst playing I have ever heard in a professional musical, and I have seen a lot of shows.

I also thought that the orchestrations weren't properly thought through for an actor musician show. There were many songs in which you were suddenly distracted by an unnecessary instrumental counter melody coming from one side of the stage. The different sounds were often not balanced at all and, because they come from every possible direction, it's really distracting. Some of the gentler songs would have sounded lovely with a more organic folk feel. Instead we get random string or woodwind lines that feel unnecessarily fiddly, over written and which pull against the songs. Put simply, aside from the singing, this was a musical mess.

I'm pleased to note that Annie Christmas (one of the score's best songs) has been re-instated. And the bluegrass feel was largely confined to Cold, where it worked really well (although the washboard playing was way too loud and drowned out a lot of the other instruments.) It was never very authentically bluegrass, though, and a lot more could have been done in that direction elsewhere in the score. The one bit of re-arranging I did think really worked was having the first couple of verses of No Matter What accompanied by the children playing classroom instruments - toy piano, chime bars, triangle etc.

This production wasn't short on ideas, but I feel like it dabbled with them and then pulled away, afraid perhaps of alienating the audience. One day maybe this show will get a great production, but I feel like I'm being generous even giving this 3 stars, despite the high standard of most of the acting.

Hooray for 'Annie Christmas' being back in, anyway!  I love the tinge of Kurt Weill's 'Pirate Jenny' in it.    Would like to see this production, but feels like they needed an even longer time to develop it and rehearse?

4 stars from Broadway world: www.broadwayworld.com/san-diego/article/Review-WHISTLE-DOWN-THE-WIND-at-The-Watermill-Theatre-20220730