Theatre review: Dark of the Moon

Look, none of us are perfect, I never said I always choose which shows to see for the purest of reasons, and whomst amongst us can say they've never slowed down to look at a car crash? When I saw Stranger Things: The First Shadow a couple of years ago I assumed that the subplot about the high school kids putting on an unbelievably cheesy school play featured a deliberate parody of Twilight, all angsty teenage love between human and supernatural characters. When Dark of the Moon turned out to be a real Broadway show from 1945, which genuinely did become a school drama staple in the next couple of decades, I predicted it wouldn't be long before someone revived the real thing as a curiosity. I was expecting Howard D Richardson and William Berney's actual original play to resurface in some small scale, but instead we get a full-blown new musical.

Jonathan Prince (book,) Lindy Robbins, Dave Bassett & Steve Robson's (music and lyrics) show takes us to an Appalachian mining town where the humans wear denim and sing bluegrass, while in the mountains invisible witches wear laddered tights and fur bikinis and sing rock.

They are led by Josie Benson's Conjure Woman and Gary Turner's Conjure Man - essentially Ursula the Sea Witch and the Count from What We Do In The Shadows, respectively. When John the Witch Boy (Glenn Adamson) falls for a human girl, he asks to be turned human so he can be with her. The Conjure Woman is the only one who can turn him human. The Conjure Woman really does not want him to become human. At no point does it occur to the Conjure Woman that she could just... not turn him human, so she does, but with Terms and Conditions of the mwahahahaha variety.

So John becomes visible to humans and takes on the persona of a guitar douchebag student who carries a guitar with him everywhere so he can never play it. This inevitably makes Barbara Allen (Lauren Jones) fall for him, but the bargain he's struck says he'll gradually turn human over a year unless one of them cheats on the other in that time. If that happens John will turn into a Witch Boy again while Barbara Allen (everyone always calls Barbara Allen by her full name, including to Barbara Allen's face, like Tracy Jordan to Liz Lemon) will die.

Georgie Rankcom's production could definitely have played this tongue-in-cheek, and I could almost admire it for trying to take the thing seriously, if the end result wasn't just us laughing at the show instead of with it. In part this is because at every turn the story chooses the most hilariously banal option available to it, not least of all the fact that the mystical Witch Boy is called... John. He proposes to Barbara Allen over potato salad, and The Conjure Woman decides to stop the marriage because when humans marry they invariably stay faithful forever.

She hatches a plan to sabotage the couple by doing... absolutely nothing as far as I can tell.

What the chorus of witches does do is regularly turn up on the roofs of Libby Todd's set to sneer at Witch Boy, crawling out of the windows to cackle at him then awkwardly trying to crawl backwards into them again. They taunt him by calling him "Witch Boy" which (a) yes he is a Witch Boy, this is the main thing that's been established about him, (b) they are all also witches and (c) everyone they know is also a witch so they really shouldn't find this so hilarious, it'd be like the humans taking the piss out of Barbara Allen for being human.

What the humans actually take the piss out of Barbara Allen for is being a slut. No, no, there will be no need for any backstory to this. The most subversive thing she seems to have ever done sexually is not wanting to have sex with Marvin (Samuel Murray,) to whom she's been promised since birth like a mediaeval princess. John attacking Marvin with a bolt of lightning is what finally alerts the town to his otherness, the fact that he's been constantly openly using his residual witch magic in front of them not having tipped them off before.

Not all the jokes are unintended, but the unintended ones are the only ones that land - if you ever want to know true silence, check out the audience after the Preacher (Martin Callaghan) does one of the running gags where he slightly paraphrases a bible verse. The cast properly throw themselves into all this, with Jones the one who truly transcends the material, giving a vocal and emotional performance that really stands out. But if I went into this with the slightly cynical idea that it might be the right kind of bad (and who knows, maybe the hope it might actually be good,) I did get the car crash I was there for.

In the end John the Witch Boy learns the moral that while the witches have always claimed to understand love, actually they don't. Which is weird, because all through the show the witches have been bragging that they don't understand love because human emotions are beneath them, but actually it turns out John isn't the first and they keep falling for mortals. So technically the moral is the complete opposite of that.

Dark of the Moon by Jonathan Prince, Lindy Robbins, Dave Bassett & Steve Robson, based on a play by Howard D Richardson and William Berney, is booking until the 8th of August at the Charing Cross Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Tom Bowles.