ED FRINGE 2023 REVIEW | Public The Musical
★ ★ ★
Reviewer - Eliott
*Disclaimer: Gifted tickets in return for an honest review
When you’re confined to a strict time length of 60 minutes to enhance an audience with your production, and especially with a musical, you are most likely going to find that fully-rounded character arcs will have to be chipped away in place of trying to showcase as much as possible for future programmers post-festival. Public The Musical suffers quite a bit from not really knowing how to pick up pace within this aspect, with plenty of pauses that could have inspired more depth in characters who feel sidelined, until they are given their main song that dumps exposition onto us and we are somehow now having to believe this character’s thoughts and feelings.
In what feels like a show catered towards the modern age of sexuality, gender, and righting the wrongs of generations before us, in a moment where witty sharpie quotes on bathroom walls are read out, the arrival of Public feels timely, and having no big opening number does give the show time to establish itself at the beginning before a number suddenly comes through, rather unexpectedly. With more time to delve into the motives of those we find ourselves trapped in the gender-neutral toilets with, Public could have on its hands a new cult following, one that will be driven by the themes and messages it presents, but whilst playing at The Pleasance Courtyard this fringe, it trips up over what it wants to become when silences play out across the space, to silence from the audience too.
