Musicals & Opera review: Creatives

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33)

Mention pop music, however, and recall the Trainspotting author as a well-known aficionado of the underground line that links Iggy Pop to punk to acid house. It’s for this reason, you suspect, that the most dominant theme in Creatives, Welsh’s musical collaboration with Don de Grazia and composer Laurence Mark Wythe, is the conflict between authenticity and selling out.

Should you, like songwriter Sean (Tyler Fayose), go for broke with easy-on-the-ear hip hop, cashing in the dollars even if it means plagiarising young artists to do so? Or should you, like long-in-the-tooth teacher Paul (Michael McKell), stick to your punk principles and speak the political truth even at the risk of obscurity?

There could be mileage in such a head-versus-heart clash, but having it played out among the pupils of a songwriting class – that has the form of a conventional Broadway musical with a touch of the X Factor about it – means the show hits a wall. Taken in isolation, Wythe’s songs are an attractive mix of genres from the Taylor Swift-style pop of Insta-famous to the mainstream rap of On the South-side. Yet, taken together, they rarely make it clear whether we should accept them at face value or treat them as satirical pastiches.

Indeed, the whole tone of Tom Mullen’s production, originally staged by Chicago Theatre Workshop, is uncertain. The knob jokes are unfunny, the student bickering unconvincing, the tensions described but not dramatised.

It’s a musical with a structure – the students perform each other’s songs anonymously in a $5,000 competition – but little in the way of a story. That is why when a gun comes out, it feels like an act of writerly desperation that is not rooted in the action. The post-shooting fallout is no more credible.

The nine-strong company performs with brio (Martina Isibor’s soulful Game On is a particular treat), but Creatives is too unevenly plotted to work either as send-up or celebration.

Until 28 August. Today 4pm