Atomic

Ka-boom! American director Damien Gray’s theatrical depiction of the 1945 dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima is truly amazing. Its visceral charge alone makes seeking out this engrossing new adult musical worthwhile — the lighting surges confront; the explosive noises reverberate in your ears; the on-stage action slows to a horrendous, mimed devastation.

Gray’s recent CV includes shows for Disney Theme Parks, a Las Vegas “musical spectacular” and a “multimedia rock and roll stunt show”, so his employment at Sydney’s out-of-the-way NIDA Playhouse is particularly surprising and most welcome. If there’s a tighter, more creative musical production anywhere in Australia this year, please lead me to it.

Atomic is the brainchild of former Sydney advertising guru Danny Ginges who has been hell-bent on developing a musical that tells the virtually unknown story of Leo Szilard, the Hungarian/Jewish physicist who discovered (and fortunately patented) the concept of a nuclear chain reaction.

Enthusiastically gathering creative partners to this difficult venture, Ginges has chosen wisely. There are excellent songs by Australian-in-New-York Philip Foxman, here delivered by a rousing six-person band; and his much-revised script has been grafted with contributions from Broadway’s Gregory Bonsignore.

There is still work to be done. The musical — actually, it’s more an ‘adult revue’, even a ‘serious burlesque’ — needs a trim. And an audience could be lost without a smattering of knowledge of physics, the 30s, and the world-changing story of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. There were some empty seats after the interval.

More fool them, I say. They missed seven marvellous performances, lead by Michael Falzon as Leo and Bronwyn Mulcahy as Trude — his tenor voice cuts through thrillingly and her final ballad (‘The Blinding, Brilliant Headlights of his Love’) is the musical highlight of the show. David Whitney has fun with fame-hungry Enrico Fermi.

The setting of sliding panels by New Yorker Neil Patel is quite brilliant. Trains, cars and planes move us from Berlin to Oxford, to New York, to the wastes of Los Alamos, to the horrors of Ground Zero, Hiroshima, where Lighting Designer Niklas Pajanti and Sound Designer Michael Waters do their very best to frighten us rigid. Never has a new show bombed quite like this!

Frank Hatherley 

Images by Gez Xavier Mansfield Photography

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