Is it “Dear Evan Hansen”?
If only.
Alas, “The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical” is a pale patch on the earlier show and a failed attempt to board the teenage fantasy-angst train. (See also: “Be More Chill” and, more successfully, “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.”) Based on the popular 2005 novel by Rick Riordan, it is both overblown and underproduced, filled with sentiments it can’t support and effects it can’t pull off.
It needn’t have been that way. When first mounted by TheaterWorks in 2014, “The Lightning Thief” was by most accounts charming: a low-tech, 60-minute romp for preteenagers. Its minimal production values, and matching ticket prices, suited a tale that was, at heart, a lighthearted fable about the “half-blood” son of the sea god Poseidon and a mortal woman. Translated from ancient Greece to contemporary New York, the tale drew its dry humor from the contrast.
The current version, which opened at the Longacre Theater on Wednesday after a seven-month national tour this year, has all the charm of a tension headache. To disguise its inaptness for Broadway, the original creative team — Joe Tracz (book), Rob Rokicki (music and lyrics) and Stephen Brackett (direction) — has doubled its length, added a clutch of unnecessary songs and generally inflated the material so hard that it explodes whatever mild pleasures made the book worth adapting in the first place.
The authors have also, significantly if silently, upped the characters’ ages. In the book, Percy is 12 when he is brought to Camp Half-Blood, a training ground and refuge for young demigods. (They need to acquire skills that will protect them from the jealous monsters of Greek mythology.) In the musical, as in the reviled 2010 movie adaptation, Percy appears to be 16 or so; at any rate, Chris McCarrell, the actor who plays him onstage, is 28.
Up-aging allows the authors to attempt social significance by hammering themes of parental neglect and teenage rebellion. At first, this is amusing, as when the opening number explains that, for half-bloods, the gods “you learned about / but weren’t paying attention to / well, they don’t pay attention to you, either.” Or when Annabeth (Kristin Stokes) describes her inattentive mother, Athena, in a neat triple rhyme: “She’s smart and she’s wise / She’s sworn off gluten and she’s sworn off guys / But if she came to camp it’d be a surprise.”
That song — “The Campfire Song” — is one of the few whose music and lyrics hang together long enough to make sharp points. Once the plot requires Percy to go on a picaresque quest to retrieve the titular lightning bolt, with Annabeth and a satyr named Grover (Jorrel Javier) in tow, the storytelling and songwriting become hectic and monotonous. Reduced to highlights and stripped of distinction, Percy’s adventures with Furies, oracles, Medusa, Ares and Hades quickly pall.
Brilliant staging — as in “Harry Potter” or “Hadestown,” another mythological mashup — might have made up for that. But “The Lightning Thief” is stranded in the contradictions of its ambition. Effects that might have looked crafty and imaginative in the original production look cheesy and anticlimactic in this one. Lee Savage’s set consists mostly of marbleized plywood scaffolding; the band, sitting atop that scaffolding, numbers just five. And why is Zeus’ lightning bolt, when it finally appears, about as awesome as a fluorescent Shake Weight?
It’s symptomatic of the illogical workarounds that the scene in which Percy’s supernatural powers are first manifested at Camp Half-Blood — a scene that, in the book, involves an exploding toilet — must make do with toilet paper, as if he weren’t the son of Poseidon but Charmin. Perhaps at this point I should take off my Scrooge glasses and see the show as a family might — albeit a family paying as much as $199 per ticket. A child might in fact enjoy the fusillade of toilet paper. Parents might enjoy McCarrell’s mostly laid back, tossed-off performance; underplaying is definitely the way to stand out in this production. And everyone might root for the cast of unknowns, all but McCarrell making Broadway debuts. It’s true that they give it their overamplified all.
But — glasses back on — I have to ask: What do we want musicals for young people and their families to be? Serious and urgent like “Dear Evan Hansen”? Sure, although that show is too exceptional to serve as a viable model. Moral tales sugared with spectacle like anything Disney? I can live with that. (Well, maybe not “Tarzan.”)
It’s the musicals lost somewhere in between I find myself unable to countenance. Not only are they often about whiny teenagers; they seem to be written by them as well.
Shows of this ilk — not just “The Lightning Thief” but also “Be More Chill,” “School of Rock” and, despite its terrific score, “13” — normalize the idea that actually quite privileged youngsters are victims of social or parental neglect. They bellow their rebellion in catchy songs; they go on childish quests to claim their maturity.
“The Lightning Thief” doubles down on that agenda. Its finale, an anthem called “Bring On the Monsters,” would be laughably banal if it weren’t so aggressively false. “The battle’s just begun!” the characters instruct the audience.
What battle? The one with the parents who ponied up the big bucks to bring you to a show featuring flashlights and sock puppets? Better to count your blessings and find another fantasy.
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Production Notes
“The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical”
Tickets: Through Jan. 5 at the Longacre Theater, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, lightningthiefmusical.com.
Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.
Credits: Book by Joe Tracz; music and lyrics by Rob Rokicki; directed by Stephen Brackett; choreography by Patrick McCollum; sets by Lee Savage; costumes by Sydney Maresca; lighting by David Lander; sound by Ryan Rumery; puppets by AchesonWalsh; hair, wigs, and makeup by Dave Bova; orchestrations by Wiley DeWeese and Rob Rokicki; fight direction by Rod Kinter; music direction by Wiley DeWeese; production stage manager, Veronica Aglow; company manager, Jim Brady; production manager, Brian Lynch. Presented by Martian Entertainment, Victoria Lang, Lisa Chanel, Jennifer Doyle and Roy Lennox, Van Dean/Meredith Lucio, O’Hara/Rae/Zurcher, Wei-Hwa Huang, Tosha Martin, Cara Talty, Fisher/Jacobs Baker/Masotti/Prince, SJGH Productions and TheaterWorksUSA.
Cast: Chris McCarrell, Jorrel Javier, Ryan Knowles, Sarah Beth Pfeifer, James Hayden Rodriguez, Jalynn Steele and Kristin Stokes.
This article originally appeared in
.