Photo: Optimum Exposure Photography
By Steve Barnes,
ALBANY — “Some People Hear Thunder” is an overambitious mess.
There was a moment during Friday’s opening of this would-be epic musical, set during the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire in 1915, when I was so flabbergasted by what was happening on stage that I looked around to see if audience members were laughing at what seemed to me surely a “Forbidden Broadway”-style parody. Somehow — and I am at a loss to explain this precisely — the Greek god Atlas becomes part of the story and bellows the song “The Sky Is Falling” from upstage while cast members flutter wide swaths of fabric to evoke waves or, perhaps, clouds. I felt slightly less than sane during that moment.
Given the problems evident throughout “Some People Hear Thunder,” an independent production that is renting Capital Repertory Theatre for the musical’s world-premiere run, it’s hard to believe that the show has been in development for more than a decade, or that it was workshopped two years ago by director and co-star Kevin McGuire. Did no one in all that time tell the creative team of Gerson Smoger and Jeffrey Sorkin, who are co-credited with the book, music and lyrics, that the business with Atlas really doesn’t belong, and that the second-act tap number feels as clichéd as the ballets that used to get stuffed into 19th-century operas?
This is all unfortunate, because the show is receiving a thorough, accomplished production from McGuire, his creative team and cast. They give us a fully realized, believable world in which the story of one of the worst but least-acknowledged atrocities of the 20th century is told through the eyes of a young American reporter and the Armenians he meets in what is present-day Turkey. The show has compelling characters, a few affecting songs and dynamic performances, but the overall result feels dissatisfying and unfinished. And the lyrics’ rhymes are often so obvious that you could make a game of predicting them.
Alex Prakken brings a fresh-faced vitality and bright, strong tenor voice to the young journalist, Jason Karras, who is dispatched by his Manhattan-based newspaper to cover Europe at the beginning of World War I. He leaves behind a disconsolate girlfriend (Rachel Rhodes-Devey) whom he updates via letter, and eventually makes his way to southwest Turkey. There he is welcomed by the family of Zoravar del Kaloustian (McGuire), an Armenian recently returned from Paris with his French wife, Angelique (Joan Hess), to settle matters of his estate.
Source: http://www.timesunion.com/tuplus-features/article/New-musical-about-Armenian-genocide-still-needs-11127682.php