Pennsylvania Avenue – MTC
Presidents and pop stars unite on stage for this ambitious musical work from Joanna Murray-Smith.
Overview
Playwright Joanna Murray-Smith and singer Bernadette Robinson, having teamed up in 2010 on the successful cabaret Songs for Nobodies, return with this collaboration for MTC. Again written specifically for Robinson as a showcase for her remarkable vocal talents, Pennsylvania Avenue makes the White House the setting for a nostalgia-fuelled journey through the music of the late 20th century.
Robinson stars as Harper Clemence, a staffer in the White House's Social Office, responsible for liaison with entertainers performing at presidential functions. Framed as a memoir of a 40-year career, from the Kennedy era to the end of Clinton' presidency, it acts essentially as a prop for Robinson to perform impressions of a wide array of celebrities, both musical and political. So we hear her whisper 'Happy Birthday' like Marilyn and boom out 'Respect' like Aretha and deliver impressive musical impressions of the likes of Barbra Streisand, Bob Dylan and Eartha Kitt.
The slick production is worthy of a show about presidents and pop stars — it even boasts a series of digital screens that transform from a White House portrait gallery into images from old concerts and historical events, some with the fictional Harper photoshopped into them. There is nostalgia galore, especially for Kennedy and to a lesser extent Clinton, and musically it stays mostly in the '60s and '70s. If that's your era, this show is playing squarely to your court.
As a showcase for Robinson's talent, Pennsylavania Avenue is fantastic. Both as an actor and as a singer, she has tremendous range and power. Her ability to recreate the vocal stylings of such a diverse spread of singers brings a great deal of joy and wonder to the audience.
However, the premise of having a fictional character interact with a who's who of American pop music and politics, kind of like a musical Forrest Gump, is hard to do without feeling contrived. This is especially the case when the script tries to incorporate Harper as an active protagonist. At times it achieves the right balance of humour and pathos, at others — such as having Harper first utter words made famous by a president for instance — it takes the theatrical conceit that step too far.
Harper doesn't really have enough depth as a character in her own right to be believable, at the same time as the show demands a high level of emotional investment in her personal journey. As a nostalgia trip, Pennsylvania Avenue is inevitably highly sentimental but at times the raw emotion from Harper doesn't gel with the tone of a piece that rides mainly on the strength of celebrity impressions.
While the show could have been better served by a script that was either more grounded in reality than whimsy or else more committed to simply being fun, when Robinson sings all else is forgiven. She knocks it out of the park with every song and leaves her audience in awe.
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