Taylor Iman Jones and Lauren Patten in The Lonely Few (Photo: Joan Marcus)
Zoe Sarnak and Rachel Bonds’s small scale rock musical, The Lonely Few, strikes some overly familiar chords with a wan score that never takes off. It is a romance about healing from past relationship wounds and taking a chance on living your own life. But with wispy characters it left me more puzzled than seduced.
Twenty-something Lila (Lauren Patten) is the lead singer in a band called The Lonely Few. She plays alongside her best friend Dylan (Damon Daunno), teenager JJ (Helen J Shen), and the drummer and middle-aged bar owner Paul (Thomas Silcott).
Her older brother Adam (Peter Mark Kendall) is always cheering her on from the sidelines but sometimes too loudly as he gets increasingly drunk each night at Paul’s bar. Adam is out of work, and struggling to make the effort to find a job, so Lila carries the weight of taking care of both of them.
When singer-songwriter Amy Burnett (Taylor Iman Jones) unexpectedly stops by the bar to reconnect with her ex-stepfather, Paul, she and Lila have an instant connection. With Amy’s current tour stalled because her opening act has dropped out, Amy invites The Lonely Few on tour with her. And for a short time, the small-town Kentucky band members get to live out their touring rock star fantasies, in a way. But reality eventually creeps back in for everyone.
With a book by Bonds and music and lyrics by Sarnak, I spent a lot of this musical confused about the characters, their motivations, and the setting and scenarios within the musical.
The production, directed by Tripp Cullman and Ellenore Scott, uses a singular set which does not help tell the story. The audience is seated within Paul’s Juke Joint bar at the start at bar tables and most of the action takes place on the stage of the bar. The second location is Lila and Adam’s house (placed above Paul’s bar). We are to imagine the stage becomes Amy’s tour stage from time to time with a larger band but it also doubles as motels and cars with only a change of lighting and sound. So, a sex scene, presumedly at a motel, is played out on the floor of the bar stage.
There are moments when the band can interact with the “bar audience” a bit, but the rest of the time the actors are doing their non-bar scenes with audience members sitting there in their faces. It’s super awkward.
The stakes of the musical were often stated but not felt. Maybe I just needed to accept that even a slight change in circumstances for these characters–a shitty bar in their town versus an equally shitty bar in another town on “tour”–is a momentous step up for them and enough to imagine a life bigger than the one they have been leading. But the musical does not do enough to communicate that well. We barely know who these characters are, so what this means to them is also lost.
We get a much clearer sense of the tensions between Amy and Paul and the time they spent together when Paul was married to Amy’s alcoholic mother. But everyone else is barely given narrative stage time. It’s broad strokes and vague reference points.
For instance, there’s a beautiful piano in Paul’s bar that no one is allowed to touch and it has unspoken importance. It is repeatedly mentioned and like the Chekhov’s gun of music, it will get played at some point but unfortunately it will not actually achieve the same bang.
Lila and Adam’s mother died and that has been a catalyst for some of their problems but I did not understand their sibling dynamic. Somehow Adam is both absolutely dragging Lila down and then saying, “go live your life and don’t worry about me even if I have called you nonstop for days and left you 8 million voicemails and made it sound like I was dead.” It is framed as an addict and a family member trying to save that addict. But Lila rarely expresses what she is feeling so it’s just circumstances we are observing–overall it’s a frustrating point of view.
This musical just assumes we will be in awe of Lila as this incredible singer and unknown rock star. But it does not set that up in any way in this production. Even with Lauren Patten’s estimable vocals, I did not catch the transformation of her mesmerizing “on stage” persona versus her aww-shucks, quiet “off stage” one. Lila does not even change her shirt when she goes on tour to vaguely signify some element of stepping it up or becoming more of this commanding stage figure. She exudes reticence over all else.
Worse, the songs are not so powerful that I would suddenly be swept away by the singer. And let me tell you, I am susceptible to this impulse, with the right music.
We’ve seen Patten absolutely turn a stage moment into something very powerful in Jagged Little Pill, so I do think the material here just doesn’t meet the moment and deliver what is intended. Meanwhile, Taylor Iman Jones’s Amy has some quieter more reflective songs and she does hold those scenes with a bit more verve and authority. You see her rock star potential.
Overall, the songs are just a garbled mess both in execution and sound design. They suffer from a colorless sameness and I struggled to hear the lyrics 75% of the time. With so little character development, the songs are left to fill in the holes and they are not up to the task.