Brett Easton Ellis' novel has done the transfer to film and now to musical - and while, certainly, psychopathy isn't entirely unknown to musicals (hi, "Sweeney Todd", greetings, "Silence!: The Musical"), the unique tone of 80's satire and murder gives this a pretty unique edge. It's a piece that requires immaculate surfaces and immense style, with the brutality hovering beneath, just waiting to burst out at surprising moments. Duncan Shiek's score is largely dissasociated electronica (with a couple of ring-ins of 80's pop hits, including the inevitable "Hip to be Square"), as the financial whiz kids wage passive agressive war on each other expressed through well-cut clothes, tight muscular bodies and perfectly designed business cards. Our guide is the dissociated Patrick Bateman, so invested in the surface details that the only human detail he has left is rabid jealousy of anybody who may possibly be slightly above him in the social strata.
Ben Gerrard's Bateman carefully avoids the trap of in any way glamourising Bateman, or playing him for sympathy - he's shallow, disengaged and petty, sometimes hilariously so, and, of course, in other places, terrifyingly so. The highlights of the cast around him are Blake Appelqvist as his chief rival, the blase Paul Owen, Shannon Dooley as his equally vapid fiance, Evelyn, and Loren Hunter as his somewhat more engaged secretary, Jean - but in essence this is a massively tight ensemble. Played on Isabel Hudson's immaculate shining set, continuously revolving, this is a weird case of an musical that uses the immaculate surface to undermine everything about its characters, to carefully pick them apart, as the tensions build to a rather shocking act one finale. Act two suffers a little from the material not quite knowing what comes next (there's not quite anything standing in Patrick's way, and the events slightly dribble away, albiet with a reasonably chilling finale as Bateman has to face himself) - but Alexander Berlarge's production is constantly intriguing (it's a rare case where a lighting designer becomes a director, but Berlarge's ability to pinpoint exactly the right action and know how to draw focus turns out to be exactly what this show needs). Costume design by Isabel Hudson gives us a wide range of stylish looks, and Yvette Lee's choreography takes us from hard corparate edges to creative club kid dances.
I tend to think that the basic material is about 50% of a great show (basically, it's got act 2 problems), but after directing one of my favourite shows of 2018 with "Cry-Baby", Alexander Berlarge goes two-for-two and makes me think he's a director I want to see as much from as possible.
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