“Once,” the musical, is not a big and splashy Broadway hit. Like the low-budget Irish film on which it’s based, the play doesn’t need mind-blowing theatrics to work its charm.
“Once,” winner of eight , is more concerned with musicianship than acting, more invested in mood than narrative.
A fleeting love story set in recession-era Dublin, it brings a stripped-down approach to storytelling and theater.
Each of the actors plays an instrument on stage in this story about making music. Spare in its Irish pub setting, mostly melancholy in its tone, the power of the work is in the universality of its feeling. For everyone who has loved and parted, “Once” looks back, to that once upon a time when things might have taken a different turn.
The trick, writer Enda Walsh’s characters teach, is to engage in life and not fear inevitable loss.
The minimal story is initiated and moved along by the Girl, as she is called, played here by Mackenzie Lesser-Roy. The Girl is an accomplished Czech pianist with a young daughter and an absent husband. The Guy, played by Sam Cieri, is a disheartened Irish street musician who plays guitar and misses his girlfriend. They meet as each is at a proverbial crossroads. They will part proverbially star-crossed. But each recognizes and fills a vacuum in the other. When she draws him into conversation (and vacuum cleaner repair), they create a bond through music that gains strength over five days together.
, a singer-songwriter, gives the production its fire. He possesses an indelible wail, a musical cry that escalates as his heartbroken character comes increasingly under the influence of the young woman who recognizes his pain and sees his potential. Lesser-Roy is a pretty vocalist and musician; their duets are quite moving. The spirited ensemble is well choreographed and, even when the lyrics are unintelligible, the angst is apparent in the music.
Fuller backstories may have made the show less universal, but it may have rendered it more transporting, too, shifting gears from lovely to profound. Here, there’s little lift or climax to the story.
Still, the deep sorrows expressed through their haunting melodies, notably “Falling Slowly,” reverberate for days, just one of the takeaways from the love letter to Dublin that is “Once.”
In this case, lovely may be enough.
“ONCE” Book by Enda Walsh, music and lyrics by Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova. Based on the movie by John Carney. With Sam Cieri, Mackenzie Lesser-Roy. Through May 29 at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts – The Ellie. Tickets start at $30 at 800-641-1222 or online at Denvercenter.org.
