REVIEW: Exposure, St James Theatre ✭

Michael Greco (Miles Mason) and David Albury (Jimmy). Photo: Pamela Raith Photography Exposure

St James Theatre

29 July 2016

1 Star

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Not everyone can write a musical. It may look easy but it's not. Exposure, a new musical currently playing at the St James Theatre, is a case in point. Just how much work must be done before a show is produced commercially with a paying audience. The answer is a lot more than this. Fancy staging gimmicks do not a musical make.

Exposure is the brainchild of writer, composer and lyricist Mike Dyer and over a dozen other credited writers. Using the Faust story as its primary building block, Exposure is the story of Jimmy, a photographer, whose photographer father is killed on the day he is born. There's some time devoted to growing up, a friend that gains pop notoriety, a relationship with a homeless girl, and a celebrity promoter/fixer who should resemble the devil but it's ultimately limp. It's all incredibly bland and incoherent.

The Cast Of Exposure. Photo: Pamela Raith Photography

Directed by Phil Willmott and then re-directed during previews by Dyer (according to a programme slip), you get the feeling that there was no captain helming this ship with enough power to stop the show heading into an iceberg. Anybody who knows me knows that I eat, breathe and live musicals. It is always in my nature to find something redemptive, but in this case the material itself is to blame. There's just nothing there.

This of course is not the fault of the cast. They are the reason that this show earnt one star, for without them it would not rate at all. There is some considerable talent on stage here. Natalie Anderson's Tara, Kurt Kansley's Father, David Albury's Jimmy and the talented ensemble deserve better material.

David Albury (Jimmy) and Natalie Anderson (Tara). Photo: Pamela Raith Photography

Special mention must also go to set and video designer Timothy Bird, who used video projection to great effect and to Mark Collins and his band who made the most of very little.

Exposure is so bland that ultimately it won't make the list of great flops, you know those shows that lurch from briliance to being dire. There's just nothing to recommend this effort at all.

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