Take Flight

Sally Ann Triplett as Amelia Earhart in Take Flight

Flight of some kind is what we inevitably wish for every time we go to the theatre—an evening to lift us out of ourselves and carry us somewhere else for several hours. So the first thing to be said about the new art musical, Take Flight, is that on those metaphor-laden terms, the show very much delivers: I doubt audiences, especially in London, will bring that much to the table in advance of a show chronicling the overlapping airborne ambitions of four American pioneers of the aviation industry: Orville and Wilbur Wright, Charles Lindbergh and that doomed daredevil of the skies, Amelia Earhart. It's additionally bracing, too, to find a genuinely original musical poking its own aspirational head above a London musical landscape littered with facetious, not strictly necessary revivals (Joseph); ceaseless pastiches of the genre (The Drowsy Chaperone, Spamalot), and retreads of shows that looked like retreads the first time round (Fame, Buddy, Footloose). Where's all hope of freshness gone? One answer lies in a show described in advance as inevitably embryonic, though that's to sell short the terrifically assured direction of Sam Buntrock, on a sloping, sandy set by Buntrock's Sunday in the Park collaborator, David Farley, defined by piles of packing crates flanking musical director Caroline Humphris' orchestra to both sides. Will the show be to everyone's taste? Inevitably not, and some may remain dry and dispassionate towards a topic that can be taken as its own trope for writing musical theatre itself. But anyone interested in pushing the form onward are advised to catch the show first and debate it later, though to my mind there's not much question that the score marks easily the most aurally sensuous collaboration yet between lyricist Richard Maltby Jr. and his longtime collaborator, the Oscar-winning composer, David Shire.

Eliot Levey and Sam Kenyon as the Wright Brothers in Take Flight

Across 17 scenes, John Weidman's deft book introduces us to a quartet of "heroic visionairies"—or are they? With Clive Carter's thickly accented inventor/mathematician Otto Lillienthal weaving through the action like some kind of spokesman of doom, we meet the various eccentrics who dared to defy gravity, in one case paying with her life. The stories amount less to a strict narrative per se than to a sort of largely sung hymn to the impossible. The great risk, as Otto is there to remind us, is failure or even death. That prospect is articulated flat out by Orville Wright (Elliot Levey) himself, who remarks to older brother Wilbur, (Sam Kenyon), "dead people never invent anything"—which only begs the question, do we spend our lives rooted to the ground, never taking wing, or do we look up and, in so doing, risk the very real chance that we might crash land? The narrative weave takes us from the mathematical calculations of the Wright Brothers during the early 1900s, the siblings seen swatting at flies as they get to grips with the first principles of flight, on to Michael Jibson's fevered Lindbergh flying solo to Paris in 1927, and from there on to Sally Ann Triplett's businesslike Amelia, who in the 1930s becomes the first woman to cross the Atlantic and the first person of either gender to do so twice. Lest the tale lack a human dimension, parents and lovers figure in different ways. We glimpse Lindbergh, on this evidence a social outcast, in conversation with his mum, while Amelia succumbs to the affections of the same publisher, George Putnam (Ian Bartholomew), who had a bestseller with Lindbergh and expects literary lightning to strike twice. Reinventing Amelia as "Lady Lindy," Putnam contributes to the popular mythology of the pre-Internet age, which finds Amelia taken up as the very topic of a Ziegfeld Follies sketch; Helen French plays Earhart's song-and-dance self.

Take Flight is particularly strong on the folly attendant upon any groundbreaking act: Lindbergh, for instance, refuses a co-pilot so that he can carry more fuel, while we're told of 14 people killed while trying to duplicate Earhart's feat. The language of lift off, meanwhile, holds amorous sway, as well: "The instant you're there/I'm lighter than air," Bartholomew's impressive, impassioned Putnam sings to Amelia. Romance and flight, we're given to understand, occupy the same domain: "If you're here by my side, I'll never be earthbound again," and so on. There are times when you fear the flight imagery is going to suffocate all chance for spontaneity—of those rushes of feeling, for instance, that Buntrock and co. found in their stirring production of Sunday in the Park with George, another show about a visionary obsessive, this time on the Pointillist front, not the piloting one. But a score that predates Weidman's book becomes this musical's ace in the hole, the songs more often than not bleeding into the narrative so as to suggest Take Flight's natural home amongst the works premiered each summer at the Almeida's contemporary music festival, i.e. not necessarily in a Broadway or West End context.