REVIEW: Everybody Loves Robbie a Heartfelt Heartbreaking Musical Comedy
In the first moments of Northern Lights Theatre’s Everybody Loves Robbie, two young people are dancing up a frenzied give-her-all bubble gum roughhouse. The two are obviously lost in delirium – and each other.
A few minutes later she pauses and asks plaintively, “Don’t you just love it when you’re making out and your partner questions his sexuality?”
The question continues to hang suspended in the air for the rest of Ellen Chorley’s clever, whip-smart, semi-autobiographical comedy-drama running through Jan. 25 at the Studio Theatre in the Arts Barns.
Chloe (Jayce McKenzie) and Robbie (Richard Lee Hsi) are discovering themselves through their mutual obsession with all things theatrical – particularly musical theatre. They fall in love while playing Claudio and Bernice in a gawd-awful high-school version of Much Ado About Nothing. It’s so bad that it’s good – with a good-natured audience joining in with laughter and applause.
To review director Trevor Schmidt’s knowing, funny and sympathetic production is to acknowledge the continuing contribution of the folks in the stands. The opening night audience immediately understood what the team of director Schmidt and playwright Chorley were trying to do and became highly involved in the show – laughing, stirring with recognition of the various shows referenced, and applauding the numerous displays of superior acting, writing and production.
Chloe and Robbie find themselves with about six other students who make up the first “Anthony Henday Fine Arts Program” in a new school. It’s a sports high school, where the only stage in the building is used as a place to stash sporting equipment. There’s a blackboard, but no chalk and the “cool” new teacher, Miss Dunbar, has had little theatre experience. But she’s going to make it work – writing post-it notes and sticking them on the wall (hence Schmidt’s ingenious set composed of flats and hundreds of post it notes). Miss Dunbar sets out to make the experience a positive one – down to buying the second-hand texts with her own money, in the process becoming the first in a number of stand-out personalities that will influence Chloe and Robbie over the years.
The rest of the play shows the growing relationship between the two – often spelled out in bits and pieces ripped from well-known and beloved musicals. If Fame is mentioned the lighting changes instantaneously and they go into a signature move from the movie. A variation of the effect is used for The Band Wagon, Superstar, Rent, Hamilton and many others – much to the delight of the audience.
When the hormones begin to flow they discover the joys of “making out” and, in the way of horny teen-agers everywhere, do it everywhere.
Schmidt is well known for his ability to make us laugh, while Chorley not only catches the cadences and ebb and flow of breathless teen romance but has the skill to pyramid laugh upon laugh until you want to cry out, “Enough!”
There is more at work here than just fun and pheromones – and that is the other side of teen sexuality, questioning your orientation and returning to the first words in the show with a whole new context – as the play moves on to a climax that is both heartfelt and heartbreaking.
Photos by Epic Photography
