The dark, brooding set by Tracy Grant Lord literally foreshadows the ghostly tale that ensues upon it. The main stage area serves as the set for the two homes in which the narrative takes place, comprising a large centre stairway beset with ornamental doves raised on poles and an astronomical telescope at the top landing; down stage, a dining table, stage right, a piano with an antique wireless radio upon it. 

For a stage musical, the dream sequence opening is remarkably placid and quaintly amusing as a strange, mercurial being wafts thru the scene in a zebra mask. All is to be revealed.

On his seventh birthday, Jeremy ‘Jem’ Glass (Mitchell Hageman*) is found passed out on a zebra crossing. Upon awaking he has a completely new personality, calling himself ‘Danny’ and failing to acknowledge his own family. Throughout the play Jem is accompanied by the ghost of the real Danny (Roy Snow). At different times either Danny or Jem does the talking, and the surrounding players likewise alternate which one they look at when addressing him. 

In the midst of it all, Jem’s slight-to-middlingly neurotic mother Viv Glass (Jennifer Ward-Lealand) is showing clear signs of midlife crisis, obsessed as she is with looks and youth as she watches teenaged daughter burgeon into womanhood. For her part, irascible, cheeky vamp-in-the-making older sister Sadie (Lauren Porteous) is just glad she’s ‘an only child again!’ Meanwhile long-suffering dad Solomon (Andrew Grainger) is concealing a wholly deeper, terrible secret…

Across town Danny’s hypersensitive mother Ruth (Rima Te Wiata) is still grieving after seven years, while his bitterly jealous younger brother Miles (Cameron Douglas) is preparing to be wed to Danny’s reclusive, resigned widow Clare (Sophia Hawthorne). Naturally there are dark, twisted secrets and back-stories here also, which begin to unravel when a seven-year-old boy arrives claiming to be Danny, the returned embodiment of their son, brother and husband. 

The melodramatic delivery from the worthy cast of this clutch of well-written characters is of course underpinned, distinctively, by the musical score.  Musical director and band-leading pianist John Gibson presents ten powerfully arranged pieces, plus refrains and reprises, drawn from the canon of antipodean music legend Tim Finn (with the exception of Danny’s signature song Out Of This World, composed for the play). 

Indeed, in itself the four-piece band’s expertly crafted music is a highlight of the whole work, while the ‘Broadwayfication’ of Finn’s original numbers is made most obvious by the vocal arrangements. 

Some are close to cringe-worthy, not least the title song (a long-time favourite Split-Enz song for me) which, as sung by Danny, comes over pretentiously earnest, failing to elicit sympathy. This trait features to varying degrees throughout, the greater exceptions being Viv’s highly theatrical yet empathetic ‘I Hope I Never’, and Ruth’s hauntingly Piafesque rendition of ‘Astounding Moon’. 

Director Raymond Hawthorne has drawn a solid, if somewhat demonstrative, performance from his skilful cast. Given the inevitably morbid centre of the tale, I get the feeling that a deeper, more naturalistic style of drama could have a more engaging effect, and by extension make it easier to engage with the contrasting abstraction of the musical pieces. As is, though co-playwright Matt Cameron’s narrative has some considerable intrigue in itself, and the cast adequately fulfil their undertaking, there’s an aspect of cohesion inescapably lacking. 

Even though I have heard fewer than half the songs’ original recordings before, it’s hard to know, from my point of view, how this work might fly without the familiarity with Tim Finn’s music and lyrics. Do the story and the songs really stack up together? Perhaps they do, but there’s precious little humour to counterbalance the dampening maudlin energy, giving Poor Boy the typically Kiwi air of macabre gloom that we seem to enjoy in our modern folk tales. The play exists, as Solomon claims to in his personal lament, ‘In A Minor Key’.
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* Alternately played by Finn McLachlan.
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This sumptuously visual, boldly experiment production draws inspiration from the music of Tim Finn and features hauntingly beautiful arrangements of classic Split Enz hits as well as lesser-known songs from Finn’s solo albums.

The play is centred on a convoluted saga about a 7-year-old boy who faints on a zebra crossing and wakes to find his body has been taken over by the spirit of a young man who died seven years earlier. The possessed boy is subject to the kind of testing used to authenticate the reincarnation of lamas in Tibetan Buddhism and his two families become deeply entangled as they realise a transmigration of souls has taken place.

If you are wondering how this kind of intricately structured ghost story relates to Tim Finn’s breezy pop songs you would have to say the connection is fairly tenuous. [More]
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For more production details, click on the title above. Go to Home page to see other Reviews, recent Comments and Forum postings (under Chat Back), and News.   

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer