Theatre in Review: The Butcher Boy (Irish Repertory Theatre)It pains me to state the obvious, but in musical theatre, as in modern architecture, form follows function. This is something Asher Muldoon should consider. Muldoon is the precocious talent behind The Butcher Boy -- having written the musical's book and score -- and, without a doubt, he has achieved something of a coup. How many college undergraduates get a first-class production at a major Off-Broadway company? Until this week, the number would be zero. Furthermore, Muldoon, who enters his senior year at Princeton in the fall, has taken on the extraordinarily difficult challenge of adapting Patrick McCabe's novel, which has been described as "a Beckett monologue with a plot by Alfred Hitchcock." It was also the basis for a surreal, blackly comic Neil Jordan film, which, in addition to scenes of brutal emotional and physical violence, features the Vatican-baiting pop singer Sinéad O'Connor as the Blessed Virgin Mary. Not that The Butcher Boy, the musical, downplays the narrative's inherent darkness. As the adolescent title character, Francie Brady, disintegrates, ultimately suffering a psychotic break, the plot includes murder, suicide, alcoholism, domestic abuse, and aggressively induced electroshock therapy; one notably sordid turn of events involves a dead body left to rot at home for weeks. At the end of the first act, vandalizing the home of his nemesis -- Mrs. Nugent, a freezingly proper widow who is the terror of her neighborhood -- Francie takes a dump on the kitchen floor. Francie's dire history is accompanied by multiple delusions, including a chorus of pigs, a mental ward staffed by giant flies, and a special guest appearance by Rod Serling. The dramatic arc is steep and downward, a journey into madness without a return ticket. As the quick failure, a few seasons back, of American Psycho showed, it is no easy task to build a show around an unreliable narrator with a shaky hold on reality. To realize such difficult material onstage cries out for a daring, entirely original approach. Muldoon, however, has penned a conventional book musical that -- with its often pleasant, but emotionally limited, score - never begins to grapple with the horrors on offer. For example, the opener, "Live Like This Forever," establishes Francie and his friend Joe as boyish troublemakers along the lines of Huck and Tom -- but even as Francie insists, "We were happy. In our little house, in our little town," a noose flies in, cueing his mother's first suicide attempt. It should be a chilling moment, but it isn't, and it's a warning sign that The Butcher Boy won't succeed at sustaining a dramatic tension between Francie's sunny self-presentation and the increasingly ugly facts of his existence. Muldoon's songs are too blandly conventional; Francie, as presented, is a one-note character; and neither the script nor Ciarán O'Reilly's production manages to evoke the small-town atmosphere -- Clones, Ireland, in the 1960s -- festering with piety and disappointment, that triggers much of the boy's bad behavior. The show is far more successful in dramatizing the sorrows of the supporting characters, including the frustrated romance of Alo, Francie's uncle, an exile in England, and Mary, a local sweetshop proprietor. "Anything and Everything," an attractive duet for Francie and the Virgin Mary, strikes a wistful note, even if it seems to come from a much gentler show. But too much of the time, the score struggles with characters and events that want darker, wilder, more overtly theatrical treatment. And, rather than setting off alarm bells, Francie's fantasy life, as rendered here, is often surprisingly bland. The Butcher Boy provides a showcase for Nicholas Barasch, a big talent who, while still in high school, earned attention for a couple of Broadway appearances. Now an adult, he remains a striking presence, thanks to his carrot-colored hair, choir boy demeanor, and soaring voice; if nothing else, the show definitively proves that he can carry an evening. But the manically cheerful Francie gives him little to work with; indeed, most of the character's unruly emotions are offloaded to a quartet in pig masks, who goad him to act out his rage against the world. Standouts in the supporting cast include Christian Strange as Joe, Francie's increasingly disenchanted best friend; Daniel Marconi as Phillip, the boy Francie and Joe love to bully; Joe Cassidy as lonely, love-wracked Alo; and Kerry Conte as three very different women named Mary. Michele Ragusa is appealing as a Dublin woman who temporarily takes in Francie; if she is less effective as Mrs. Nugent, it is in part because the character has been stripped of her ferocity. The show's most original and accomplished aspect is its production design. Charlie Corcoran's scenic design wraps the action in a shack-like environment consisting of weathered wood planks dotted with comic-book flourishes. The upstage wall is a giant TV, which projection designer Dan Scully fills with images of The Lone Ranger, John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, insane asylums, mushroom clouds, stained-glass windows, and the Vincent Price film The Fly; he also uses extensive footage from "Eye of the Beholder," the Twilight Zone episode that induced nightmares in a generation of boomers. Kat C. Zhou's lighting makes good use of saturated colors to strike a disordered mood. Orla Long's costumes have a solid feel for the time frame and setting. Considered strictly as the work of a nineteen-year-old novice, The Butcher Boy is highly promising. As a sophisticated theatrical treatment of a difficult contemporary novel, it is an outright failure. The Irish Rep was right to recognize Muldoon's gifts, but, putting them prematurely on display, the company is not serving his best interests. I hope he learns from it and moves on to better things. --David Barbour 
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