The Grinning Man

The Grinning Man is a hugely entertaining music theatre show – a hybrid mix of melodrama, pathos, pantomime, and very black comedy – performed by a hugely talented cast who sing, play musical instruments, dance, cavort, mug – and bring people to tears.  The music is kaleidoscopic inventive pastiche, mixing pop with classical, and referencing many modern music theatre hits.  Music Director David Youings gets energy and clarity out of his ensemble of six.

The show slides from Grand Guignol to tragedy to physical comedy, racy double entendre and gross humour, and back again without missing a beat.  Characters include our hero, sideshow attraction Grinpayne, a hideously disfigured man – his face permanently cut into a rictus smile – Dea, his love, a blind orphan girl, Ursus, a kindly freak show proprietor, Mojo the wolf (a puppet), sex-mad Duchess Josiana, Duke Derry-Moir, Josiana’s loopy brother (and sometime lover), eccentric, previously mute Queen Angelica, the haughty Lord Trelaw, and a madly ambitious clown/jester and Mr Fixit, Barkilphedro - who is also our very knowing Narrator.

Maxwell Simon is a powerful presence as Grinpayne the man; he sings of his quest to find who cut him so cruelly with great emotion – and through the bloody bandage that covers his disfigured grin.  Luisa Scrofani is a sweet and touching adult and blind Dea.  Dom Hennquin brings great presence and dignity to Ursus – his depiction of guilt is a most moving element in the show.

It is true, however, that Grinpayne’s story is possibly not given as much weight as it might have been – his quest, his suffering and his effect on others are carried in song, but more reported than dramatised – and it is the comic characters who stand out.  We get it, we follow the tale, but we are perhaps not as moved as we might be.  The comedy undercuts an essentially horrific story of injustice, poverty, cruelty and suffering.  Shallow creatures that we are, we do tend, with this fast-moving complicated show, to pass over the sad bits and hang out for the next comic turn, song or bit of business.  This is especially so when Melanie Bird, as Josiana, the parody nympho, is such a brilliant verbal and physical comedian – matched by Anthony Craig as her brother.  Stephanie Astrid John is a perfect near robotic Queen Angelica who gets laughs by announcing extraordinary things while remaining dead pan.  And of course, the indefatigable Jennifer Vuletic – the Narrator, the villain, the thwarted social climber Barkilphedro – dominates the story and the stage.  Is there anything Vuletic cannot do?

The original productions in Bristol and London employed puppets (some of the show’s creators were also the creators of the huge hit Warhorse) but this current production has decided against puppets for artistic or possibly budget reasons.  That change means characters such as Grinpayne and Dea as children are represented by live actors (Matthew Hearne and Lilly Cascun – who really is blind). 

The show began life at the Bristol Old Vic in 2016 before transferring to the Trafalgar Studio in London’s West End in 2017 for a six-month successful run.  Here, it is enthusiastically revived for its Australian debut.  As music theatre, it is, as noted, a strange beast.  The setting is a surreal ‘Lonn-donn’ in the late 17^th century and on into the reign of Queen Anne in the 18^th century with its mix of sordid back streets, prisons and palaces – all superbly evoked by Sophie Woodward’s excellent, only apparently simple set design that even retains a theatrical tongue-in-cheek stage within the stage, with curtains for important reveals.

The Grinning Man is in fact – and amazingly - an adaptation – a pretty loose and cut-down adaptation - of Victor Hugo’s 1869 Gothic novel The Man Who Laughed (L’Homme qui rit).  Like Hugo’s more famous and familiar works, Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Notre-Dame de Paris), it has a social message and a sprawling, complex plot. 

That complex plot had necessarily to be reduced and simplified for music theatre but in retaining the key elements and characters, if the plot does get a little hard to follow in places, it does not seem to worry the audience at all; we are swept along by the gusto of the cast, the gags, the clever anachronisms, the brisk direction by Miranda Middleton and Ashley Taylor Tickell, and Freya List’s spirited choreography.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Ben Fon