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Anthony Galde, Chase Crandell, Lauren Elder and the cast of Mary and Max – A New Musical.Trudie Lee

  • Mary and Max – A New Musical
  • Music and lyrics by Bobby Cronin, book by Crystal Skillman
  • Directed by Stafford Arima
  • Starring Katie McMillan, Lauren Elder, Anthony Galde
  • At Theatre Calgary

Rating:

2.5 out of 4 stars

You can’t beat the voices in Mary and Max, a new musical from a team led by Theatre Calgary artistic director Stafford Arima.

The trouble is that those beautiful pipes have been assigned to give form to a narrative voice still searching for perfect pitch.

Adapted from an unlikely source, an animated 2009 Australian claymation film by Adam Elliot, set in the pre-Internet 1970s and ’80s, Mary and Max is filled with characters looking to make a human connection, who do it in the most romantic way imaginable: letter writing!

I love that.

The thing is, Mary and Max is not a romance. (It better not be.) Instead, it’s an ode to an oddball friendship between lonely 10-year-old Australian Mary (Katie McMillan and then Lauren Elder) and 40-year-old Max (Anthony Galde), a New Yorker with Asperger’s syndrome who wishes he had a friend.

That comes true, completely at random, when bullied Mary finds his name in a phone book, writes him a letter and against all odds – and all believability – they connect.

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The set, by Bretta Gerecke, is expressionistic and vertical.Trudie Lee

I imagine the show’s creators aimed to capture the spirit and tone of the film, but sometimes what’s wistful and whimsical with claymation figures turns into lead-footed literalness when musical-theatre characters say the same things.

But man, can they sing!

Cast member Nick Adams – peeled straight off the back of a Joe Weider bodybuilding magazine from 1978 – can really belt, as can the show’s leads, Galde as ingratiating, needy Max and both Elder and McMillan as meek, bullied Mary, a girl with a birthmark in the middle of her forehead that looks like a bindi that mutated into a monster mole.

Not to be overlooked vocally is Chase Crandell, who plays the moon, the show’s omniscient narrator. I wanted to shoot the moon.

They’re all fantastic singers, but the showstopper comes from Susan Gilmour, as Mary’s verbally abusive alcoholic mom Vera – who admonishes plain-Jane Mary to smile more by saying, “Pretty girls smile no matter what” – stoned in the bathtub, sucking on a flask, singing The Only Thing You Can’t Steal Is Time, an ode to not succumbing to the could-haves and should-haves of life that’s genuinely moving and beautifully sung.

If there is a subtext to Mary and Max, it’s a lament for all the screens that have come between people, a laudable message – but somewhat counterintuitively, Mary and Max starts out in 1970, which to our screen-saturated 21st-century generation seems like the good old days of genuine human interactivity.

There’s a TV show that Mary watches for company called The Noblets, which is a variation on any number of kids’ shows, but director Arima’s efforts at creating comic subplots featuring wacky TV characters falls flat.

Likewise, when a fantasy sequence set in Chocolate Heaven turns into a literal set-piece, I felt as if I had been shipped to musical-theatre hell – although to be fair, Alana Hibbert’s Mother Chocolate almost managed to get me to buy in with her diva act.

The set, by Bretta Gerecke, is expressionistic and vertical, presenting a Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Google it!) vision of Max’s New York that’s pretty Seussical in terms of visual reference too.

Underneath the unsteady tone, however, there’s still an uplifting human message to Mary and Max, which endears you to it, and in the second act, the story shifts focus to Mary’s journey and becomes something else altogether: an old-fashioned coming-of-age musical after all, and not an unlikeable one at that.

Mary and Max – A New Musical runs in Calgary through Nov. 11 (theatrecalgary.com).

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