Ernest Shackleton was an adventurer, polar explorer and a guy who survived in the Antarctic by drifting on ice floes even though eating penguins and pet dogs. In the new two-character musical at Porchlight Songs Theatre, Shackleton appears from inside a fridge inside of the apartment of a one Brooklyn mother.
As wacky as that sounds — and “Ernest Shackleton Loves Me” is a person wacky-backy musical — it is not the key trouble listed here. It is the campy way in which this show is directed, enjoying to the material’s weaknesses rather than its potential strengths: Andrew Mueller performs Shackleton as if he have been an off-brand Monty Python character and that does not even remotely gel with Elisa Carlson’s more sensible Kat, a malcontent hipster who composes songs for video game titles and engages in fraught on the net dating, even as her child cries in the upcoming room.
Shackleton is, in essence, an object of Kat’s intimate fantasies and, at the time he has emerged from between her milk and strawberries, the two go off on an adventure that will involve the explorer dispensing existence tips for Kat together with tasty morsels of seal blubber.
And if that is not strange ample, Mueller has a second character to perform: Kat’s loser boyfriend and child daddy, a “Rock of Ages” refugee and gentleman-boy or girl who is part of a Journey cover band. Precisely how a person like Kat could perhaps be with such a loser guy in no way is stated. It is all just a strange machine.
I like numerous of book writer Joe DiPietro’s populist reveals, but the blend of this substance and the Porchlight staging is, frankly, just not for me. The show’s systemic problems are compounded by the use here of a big cellphone display, usually a tough concept in reside theater, upon which both equally of Kat’s males seem in weird photoshopped montages, and by the approaches in which director Michael Unger’s generation under no circumstances sets up a consistent globe. At first, you are led to consider Kat is making all of the music on her electronic looping technique, which is a neat idea, but then the present appears to fall that system solely and the expressionistic factors dissipate.
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Andrew Mueller and Elisa Carlson in “Ernest Shackleton Loves Me” by Porchlight Theatre. (Liz Lauren)
For most of the clearly show, the performers do not admit the viewers, until eventually Shackleton suddenly delivers a chunk of that blubber down the center aisle. And, at other instances, shafts of mild illuminate an empty stage without the need of rhyme or evident motive.
I will say this, while: Carlson has a formidable assignment, singing a substantial sum of Brendan Milburn’s tunes and Val Vigoda’s lyrics for just about all of the out there ninety minutes, not to mention manipulating all the technical factors on which the display, at the very least initially, is dependent. She’s video game, appealing and all-in with this nonsense: completely admirable work in every single and every way.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Evaluate: “Ernest Shackleton Enjoys Me” (two stars)
When: By way of June one
Where: Porchlight New music Theatre at the Ruth Web page Heart for the Arts, 1016 N. Dearborn St.
Operating time: one hour, 30 minutes
Tickets: $25-$77 at porchlightmusictheatre.org