Mirvish Productions, Toronto
â­â­â­â­â©

by Iain Softely and Stephen Jeffreys, directed by Daniel Leveaux

Mirvish Productions, Royal Alexandra Theatre, Toronto

July 29-September 2, 2012

âThe Life and Death of the Fifth Beatleâ

There are two important things you should know if you are thinking of seeing Backbeat.Â First, it is NOT a compilation musical based on the greatest hits of the Beatles.Â Second, it is NOT a revue of Beatles songs performed by a Beatles tribute band like Rain.Â Instead, Backbeat is a serious play streaked with humour that happens to have music because the central character belongs to a rock band.Â That music happens to be songs recorded by the Beatles because that is the rock band the central character, Stuart Sutcliffe, belonged to from 1960 to 1961.Â While the subtitle for Backbeat is âThe Birth of the Beatlesâ, in fact, the rise of the Beatles forms the background against which the story of the short life of the so-called âfifth Beatleâ forms the main plot.

The subtitle also suggests triumph, but with the focus on Sutcliffe, the mood is more complex.Â Sutcliffe (1940-62) was a promising student at the same art school in Liverpool where John Lennon also studied.Â They eventually became roommates.Â Despite Sutcliffeâs rudimentary guitar skills, Lennon persuaded him to quit art school and join his band.Â Sutcliffe went with the four â John, Paul, George and Pete Best, their drummer at the time â when their agent found them a regular gig in Hamburg.Â The gig turned out to be playing for six hours seven nights a week in a club in the sleazy St. Pauli district with an audience of prostitutes and low life.Â Their accommodations were behind the screen of a movie theatre.Â

In Hamburg their reputation began to grow and art student Klaus Voormann caught their act and thought his girl friend Astrid Kirchherr would like it.Â She did and immediately caught Sutcliffeâs attention.Â A photographer, she took the first artistic photos of the group and is credited with later changing their Teddy Boy hairstyles to their famous moptop style and in designing their collarless performance suits.Â

In Backbeat, Kirchherr (Isabella Calthorpe) and Sutcliffe (Nick Blood) have already fallen in love during Act 1 and the central tension has already been established.Â Kirchherr wants Sutcliffe to give up the band and go back to art school to realize his talent as a painter.Â Lennon (Andrew Knott) wants Sutcliffe to stay with the band because he feels sure they are bound for fame.Â The show does not disguise the fact that Lennon is also in love with Sutcliffe and wants him in the band despite the low opinion the other three bandmates have of Sutcliffe.Â Sutcliffeâs James Dean-style good looks may help attract the female crowd but he is fairly useless as a bass player.

Based on his 1994 film of the same name, writer Iain Softley with co-writer Stephen Jeffreys re-imagined the film for the stage in 2010.Â What emerges is a vivid picture of 1960s club life in Hamburg that forms a strange apolitical, non-satirical parallel to the 1930s club life in Berlin the musical Cabaret.Â Here club-owner Bruno Koschmider (Edward Clarke) has to keep urging The Beatles to âMach Schauâ (âMake a showâ) since the five simply stand there and sing and donât move about on stage.Â In Cabaret, Sally Bowles chooses to stay in Berlin and rejects marriage so she can become a âstarâ albeit in dive that will likely not survive the coming war.Â In Backbeat, Sutcliffe quits the Beatles in 1962 choosing not to be a star, stays in Hamburg to focus on his painting and becomes engaged to Kirchherr.Â Yet, though Backbeat frames Sutcliffe as choosing between fame (with the band) and being true to himself (by returning to art), the notion of choice is rendered irrelevant when fate intervenes.Â Sutcliffe dies of a brain aneurysm at age 21.Â The play thus has a downbeat ending and makes you think less of the Beatlesâ success and more of the thousands who fail to achieve it.

Of the twenty songs in the show, only three are by Lennon and McCartney since at the beginning of the Beatles career, they primarily covered songs by other artists.Â Director Daniel Leveaux deliberately downplays the endings of most of the songs by having the sliding platform on which the group performs glide upstage to be hidden by a screen before the song is finished.Â He also interrupts several songs with long sections of dialogue.Â Contrary to the subtitle, only one scene deals with the Beatles finding their own voice.Â This is when Lennon advises McCartney on how to give âLove Me Doâ a greater sense of urgency.Â

All this is meant to have us view the show more as a play rather than a musical, even though the audience disregards this and applauds every song, even if it lasts only two-and-a-half minutes.Â When the show ends with the Beatlesâ first hit song âLove Me Doâ, the moment is bittersweet.Â The Beatles, now in their final line-up as a four-man group with Ringo Starr replacing Pete Best, are on their way to success while we are still coping with the emotions created by Sutcliffeâs sudden death.

This ending fraught with such a complex mix of feelings is the perfect conclusion for a show that, contrary to its full title, has been devoid of triumphalism and has depicted the Beatlesâ time in Hamburg as testing, chastening and sad.Â It is therefore very unfortunate that Leveaux opts for the cast to give an upbeat mini-concert of Beatles tunes for the curtain call and deliberately sends dancers into the aisles to encourage audience members to twist and shout.Â To anyone affected by Sutcliffeâs wasted life and the other unhappiness in the show, this attempt to raise our spirits seems all wrong.Â Luckily, I far as I could tell, none of the audience was drawn out by the dancers to effect a forced âdancing in the aislesâ ending.Â

This is Leveauxâs only mistake.Â Otherwise, he has drawn excellent performances from the entire cast with superb acting, singing and playing from the five âBeatlesâ.Â Nick Bloodâs charismatic, conflicted Sutcliffe, Calthorpeâs passionate Kirchherr and Knottâs note-perfect Lennon, whose cockiness clearly hides deeper emotions are the three who command our attention.Â Daniel Healyâs gentle Paul McCartney has a rather minor role and Daniel Westwick as George Harrison and Oliver Bennett as Pete, otherwise nearly invisible, at least have one scene where they can shine.Â Dominic Rouse has a fine scene as Klaus Voormann, who discovers Kirchherr in bed with Sutcliffe and stoically cedes any claim to her to Sutcliffe.

Overall, designer Andrew D. Edwards has created a look that recalls the combination of grittiness and clean lines that characterize French New Waves film of the 1960s.Â The projections by Timothy Bird and Nine Dunn of Sutcliffeâs paintings and Kirchherrâs photos lend insight and authenticity to both characters and their debates about art.Â

The 1960s are often portrayed as an exciting time when anything seemed possible.Â Two of the possibilities that most musicals ignore are the more difficult subjects of death and unfulfilled promise.Â Backbeat does not ignore these subjects and is infinitely more moving and stronger for it.Â Â

Â©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Andrew Knott, Nick Blood, Isabella Calthorpe, Oliver Bennett, Daniel Healy and Dan Westwick. Â©2012 Cylla von Tiedemann.