tick, tick…Boom! at Theatr Clwyd – review

Usually, a review of a show opening with lyrical waxing about the building in which the show sits is not a good sign. In this case, the shouting from the rooftops about the rooftops – and the rest of the building beneath them – is justified but shouldn’t be taken as a reflection on the quality of the work on stage.

It’s taken three years of physical labour and about a decade of mental lifting, not to mention over 50 million pounds, but Theatr Clwyd, the venue on top of a hill in Mold, North Wales, has finally reopened.

Spearheaded by chief executive Liam Evans-Ford and carried over the line by artistic director Kate Wasserberg, the new building is remarkable, with a light, airy, comfortable, welcoming theatre with a spacious mainhouse.

The newly-crowned Moondance Theatre, formerly named after one of Wales’s most famous sons, Anthony Hopkins, needed something big and bold as an opening statement. It fails on only one of those fronts as I attend a preview performance of its opening show.

tick…tick…Boom! is not big. But programming it as the opening shot from a 50-million-pound building certainly is bold. It is, of course, Jonathan Larson’s three-hander Russian Doll of a musical, telling the story of a struggling composer stuck in a dead-end job, with a girlfriend who wants to settle down, and trying to write a musical he just can’t finish.

It’s an interesting choice from an intelligent artistic director who knows how to please a crowd – her direction of James Graham’s Boys from the Blackstuff was an imaginative, embracing piece of work with a big cast.

Here, Wasserberg has just three players to tell the story, although ultimately it all hinges on the actor playing Jon, aka Larson, in this hugely autobiographical piece.

Ryan Owen has the right underdog spirit; you wouldn’t cast him as a leading man, but that’s exactly the point here. Larson, the creative brain behind the scenes, only performed tick, tick…Boom! as a solo piece as he was workshopping it, before his premature death. He would, presumably, have always taken the sole role of writer had he been alive to see his other musical, Rent, become the success that it did.

Owen is joined on stage by an effervescent Christina Modestou as Jon’s girlfriend Susan, desperate to believe in her beau, but also for their lives to move out of its state of stasis. She is also particularly amusing as Jon’s agent, surely a model for Estelle, Joey’s agent in Friends.

Tarik Frimpong is somewhat underserved by the material as Jon’s best friend Michael, only really a sketch of a character, and his performance as Jon’s father is more caricature in truth.

Wasserberg moves the cast around the stage with wit and flair, giving us more than our money’s worth from just three actors. The set – proudly built on site in the newly refurbished building – is a thing of real beauty. The revolve with the inner-revolve, used so effectively in Hamilton, is employed beautifully in miniature here.

It’s not a big boom of a beginning for Wasserberg, but it’s certainly food for thought, and given the central premise of the show – is the pursuit of art worth the pain – it plants a flag for the future.