Starling is given an assignment to interview former psychiatrist and convicted serial killer Hannibal Lecter (Mark Oxtoby) in his basement cell, in the belief that he can provide clues to the identity of another killer, still very much at large, nicknamed Buffalo Bill (Jake Anthony.) Lecter does have a lot of suspiciously detailed and accurate information about this killer, but in returns for sharing it he wants both some major changes to his living conditions, and to get into Clarice's head.
I remember the film being a huge deal at the time, and to this day it seems to keep spewing out sequels, prequels and spin-offs, so there's no doubt it's ingrained in the popular imagination, but Bell and the Kaplans' script hones in on the fact that if you separate it from the iconic moments and the scares, the story doesn't hold up very well: In particular the fact that it's all honkingly unsubtle but is somehow considered the opposite, there's jokes about the cannibal just so happening to have an incredibly unusual, rhyming name ("Hannibal the Cannibal? I've never heard that before, that's so clever, I have to write it down") and Lecter having concocted an incredibly elaborate scavenger hunt in a storage facility, just on the off-chance that someone might ask him this exact question some years down the line.
My favourite of these gags is Senator Martin's (Catherine Millsom) song "My Daughter Is Catherine," in which the apparently incredibly clever, subtle psychological technique of using her name to stop Bill from being able to dehumanise her devolves into her just singing "Cathering, Catherine, Catherine" on a loop. I also liked Jenay Naima as Ardelia getting a big showstopping number that's also a sly dig at the fact that Clarice has been given a black friend who only gets one tokenistic moment of actually contributing to the story.
But both the musical itself and Gattelli's gleefully lo-fi production are almost twenty years old now, and despite a very strong cast it's starting to show. The straight-up parodies of the film's more ridiculous elements are pretty much all the show has to offer, and apart from a couple of silly moments - the chorus of singing lambs narrating the action, a late number in which the SWAT team basically do an On The Town number before smashing a door down - there's not a lot of thinking outside the box, no sense of the writers and director grabbing every possible gag that comes their way. As a result you get a show that got a few big laughs out of tonight's audience, but nowhere near enough given the ridiculousness of the premise.
While the deliberate tattiness of the production is part of the joke, and a pair of glasses with a viewfinder stuck on them as Bill's night vision goggles is still funny*, in 2024 maybe the show could have done with a bigger, gorier, sillier production to still get its laughs. There's a similar issue with values dissonance that might have benefited from a new production: Would it have hurt to tweak the show to more pointedly attack the film's transphobia, rather than just replay it? A musical version of The Silence of the Lambs is as endearingly daft an idea as it is a hilariously inappropriate one, and it's just a shame the end result doesn't push both those elements to their full comic effect.
Silence! The Musical by Hunter Bell, Jon Kaplan and Al Kaplan, based on The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris and the film by Ted Tally and Jonathan Demme, is booking in repertory until the 28th of September at the Turbine Theatre.
Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes straight through.
Photo credit: Mark Senior.
*OK, maybe not for a younger generation who don't know what a viewfinder is, but then again would they even have seen the film?
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