Sing Street
Opening Night: December 16, 2019
Closing: January 26, 2020
Theater: NY Theatre Workshop
Tony Award winners and NYTW Usual Suspects Rebecca Taichman and Enda Walsh bring John Carney’s “funny, joyful and effortlessly cool” indy hit film SING STREET to the stage. Dublin, 1982. Everyone is out of work. Thousands are seeking bluer skies across the Irish Sea. Sixteen-year-old Conor and his schoolmates turn to music to escape troubles at home and impress a mysterious girl. With a score that embraces the new wave sounds of the era, SING STREET celebrates the thrill of first love and the power of music.
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December 16, 2019
A boy presses “play,” and the world goes away. That basic, everyday magic act — variations of which have been practiced by restless adolescents since the dawn of recorded sound — takes on fresh, senses-stirring life in the opening moments of “Sing Street,” which opened on Monday night at New York Theater Workshop. This promising but still unfulfilled adaptation of John Carney’s 2016 film about a fledgling pop band in dreary Dublin begins with an unhappy family watching a television show about the discontents of being young and Irish during the 1980s recession. A voice from the screen says that it’s time for his generation to flee Ireland, that “it feels like it’s not a country for young people.”
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December 16, 2019
Writer-director John Carney’s coming-of-age movie about 1980s Dublin kids rocking their way to personal liberation came out in 2016 and less than four years later, it’s an Off Broadway musical. That must be a new land speed record for adapting a property from screen to stage. Based on the muted and disappointing Sing Street at New York Theatre Workshop, however, the creative team should have taken longer, failed more, and learned from their mistakes. Most of what’s fresh and appealing in the film (which is cheerfully formulaic) has been lost in a leaden theatrical frame that saps milieu, character and music-making of any tension or charm.
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December 16, 2019
Mirroring the screen-to-stage evolution of John Carney’s ‘Once,’ the Irish filmmaker’s semi-autobiographical 2016 comedy about a 1980s Dublin high school pop band gets theatrical treatment. Writer-director John Carney’s background in Irish rock band The Frames has informed much of his screen work, exploring the power of music to liberate and connect us in films like Once and Begin Again. He drew on experiences from his own youth in economically depressed 1980s Dublin in the 2016 feature Sing Street, a let’s-make-a-band high school story that doubled as a valentine to the flamboyant new wave Brit pop of the period. Playwright Enda Walsh and director Rebecca Taichman have remodeled that source material into a spirited stage musical, which feels like a work in progress but has no shortage of winning elements.
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