LA Review: 'Cloudlands'

Playwright-lyricist Octavio Solis and composer-lyricist Adam Gwon certainly deserve an A for audaciousness. Their new chamber musical "Cloudlands" attempts to graft Greek tragedy, in all its gaudy and hyper-emotional glory, onto a modern and naturalistic setting. It's a tall order, and they don't entirely succeed. In its debut production at Costa Mesa's South Coast Repertory, the story of a San Francisco teenager who struggles to come to terms with a shocking discovery is too emotionally weighty and crammed with overwrought symbolism to be contained in its modest framework of setting and venue. Ripe with secrets, betrayals, love, lust, and death, this is the stuff of grand opera—or Grand Guignol.

In the opening scene, Monica sprawls dreamily in San Francisco's Dolores Park, staring at the sky. "Couldn't I disappear to that land of clouds?" she sings. Monica's problems should be familiar to parents or followers of teen drama. Her mom and dad, Gerald and Caroline, lock horns repeatedly at the dinner table. Monica yearns to leave family dysfunction far behind.

Soon she stumbles on the apparent reason for her parents' discord, secretly catching her mother in the embrace of another man. No shrinking violet, Monica decides to up the ante by befriending him without revealing her identity. To her surprise, the adulterer is an erudite and charming buyer and seller of old maps, a Mexican expatriate named Victor (yes, the ancient cartography is another Big Symbol). They strike up a friendship when Monica offers to regularly clean his store.

If you can see where this heavy-handed tale is heading, then you've uncovered the musical's greatest shortcoming: the by-the-numbers quality of its plot. Even the dramatic twist at the climax will surprise no one. Still, Solis and Gwon are excellent craftsmen. Gwon's musical vocabulary is well suited to these characters and their milieu. His style is pungently melodic and emotionally supple and engaging, although he stuffs too many songs into a show that's only 90 minutes long without an intermission. Solis gives his characters well-defined arcs—huge ones, admittedly—but the script could benefit from leaving more unsaid.

Director Amanda Dehnert gets well-grounded and credible performances from her actors. As Monica, Addi McDaniel is in almost every scene, and she captures teen angst deftly without resorting to easy cues or clichés. Joseph Melendez and Katrina Lenk weave emotional complexity and unexpected sympathy into lovers Victor and Caroline, who must win our sympathy if the story is to succeed. Melendez also has the best voice in the cast, which is plagued by uneven singing in other roles.

As the cuckolded Gerald, Robert Mammana is saddled with a passive character; so is Adam Kaokept as Monica's beleaguered and overly saintly boyfriend. Both actors wring badly needed nuance from their parts with between-the-lines subtleties.

Music director and keyboardist Dennis Castellano leads a tight onstage band that's mostly hidden in Christopher Acebo's stark, slightly cramped set. One can imagine a future production with more space for the story's expansive emotions and a bigger house to accommodate their powerful resonance.

Presented by and at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Dr., Costa Mesa. April 21–May 6. Tue.–Sun., 7:45 p.m.; Sat. and Sun., 2 p.m. (No performance Sun., May 6, 7:45 p.m.) (714) 708-5555 or www.scr.org. Casting by Joanne DeNaut