Dani Girl

Television used to be awash with ‘Movies of the Week’ with characters that suffered ‘diseases of the week.’ Musical theatre of late seems to have acquired the same affliction. William Finn started the ball rolling with his AIDS trilogy In Trousers, March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland. He followed with the equally as serious A New Brain which dealt with a songwriter who’s diagnosed with a brain tumor. Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey won a Pulitzer Prize with their take on bi-polar disease with Next To Normal, and now Dani Girl offers us a nine-year-old girl suffering from paediatric leukaemia.

Strong subjects with dark themes requiring skilled composition and writing. In my book Dani Girl doesn’t quite make it. It’s well-meaning and earnest but too often settles for platitudes at the key emotional moments. The plot set in a hospital revolves around Dani, who’s lost her hair to chemotherapy, her 10 year-old fellow patient, Marty, Dani’s imaginary friend and ‘guardian angel’ Raph, and Dani’s mother.

The authors use Dani’s flights of imagination to show how she copes with her serious situation and in the process lighten the piece. The music and lyrics are generic off-Broadway, with the production and all-white set adequate. Heidi Enchelmaier as Dani sings well and has appeal, likewise Shaun Kolman as Marty. Dash Kruck as the imaginary friend runs around the stage a lot using funny voices that sometimes work and sometimes don’t, and Juanita Ellis-Gloster as the Christian mother sprouts trite lines about prayer and faith. Musical accompaniment by Sophie Mangan on piano was accomplished.

This is the first production of the work outside of North America where it has had several workshops. Its professional premiere was in Canada in January 2011. Harvest Rain did a successful one-week workshop of the musical in 2010.

Peter Pinne