The premise is simple: Sting meets the refugee crisis. If your eyebrows raise at this, you aren’t alone. I was intrigued and skeptical, how the stalkerish soft rock of a British singer-songwriter born in 1951 would connect to one of the major global calamities of our time. Running at New York City Center through May 12, Message in a Bottle with ZooNation bypasses your head to hit your heart with a blunt but well-aimed arrow.
Here’s a recap of the narrative. Once upon a recent time, in a land far, far away, a father, a mother and their three teenagers enjoy a life of idyll in the embrace of a peaceful community. When strife breaks out and the patriarch dies, the remaining villagers flee to what they hope and pray will be greener pastures. During their journey, they confront perilous oceans, sex trafficking, open-air refugee camps, imprisonment, loneliness, and separation from everyone and everything they hold dear. Thanks to the magic of theater, the kids reunite at the end, including with their deceased mother and father. If this sounds like a fairy tale concocted from front-page headlines, well, that’s about right.
My skepticism seemed warranted in the opening number. We meet our main characters and assorted villagers as Sting croons how he dreams of rain in “Desert Rose.” Apropos of nothing, folks scamper downstage and throw themselves through a quick, trick-filled solo. My doubt turned to straight cringe when the paramour of one of the sons bangs out a hot set of fouettés. Was this going to be almost two hours of So You Think You Can Dance tacked on to a loose story?
Yes and no.
Kate Prince goes potluck with the choreography. The influences include breaking, Bollywood, contemporary, hip-hop, ballet, and more. Lindy Hop makes a head-scratching appearance against barbed wire imagery and scary bad guys.
You will never forget that, although it’s not a musical, it’s still THEATER. Dancers bust through cheesy tropes such as canons and stop-on-a-dime poses. Gimmicks pile up, like cars on a highway. A giant hanging orb that streams sand and flashy projections of stars above a stormy sea smack us in the face with their metaphorical significance. Most weirdly, the cast is usually grinning, even when there’s plenty to bear.
In Act 1, the stage registers as overstuffed and overly busy. Anything emotional loses its impact due to the sheer number of folks doing high knees and top rocks. Prince connects to the pulse of each song, building the choreography from the ground up. Sometimes, this works. The feet hit the beat, and this accenting of the accents provides a literal resonance. Other times, the rhythmical footwork feels so divorced from the song’s content that it borders on parody, like when I spied the Charleston during “An Englishman in New York.” I wished Prince would reverse her process and occasionally work from the melody down to provide contrast.
So, how does Sting’s oeuvre fit into this? Way better than expected! With their literary allusions, clever wordplay, moderate tempos, and unexpected instrumentations (bagpipes, harmonica), his songs cast a poetic spell. Most of them sound exactly as they do on the radio, which means you may be pulled from the present to remember what that song meant to you way back when. Sometimes, different vocalists sing or the arrangements have been altered, and this specificity is lost, the music becoming yet another element in a production teeming with elements. But when it’s Sting singing, then, his distinctive, throaty tenor acts as a sonic umbrella under which his fate-filled lyrics pull people this way and that.
Act II is where I succumbed to what the audience had been cheering for since the first note sounded – heart-on-sleeve schmaltz. It helps that Prince clears the stage to focus on the journeys of the young adults. The daughter finds herself in the company of friendly islanders with Karate Kid-style headbands. A son arrives in a bustling city where he falls for a handsome man. “Shape of My Heart” takes on a three-dimensional feel during their duet of exploration and emotional surrender. Another brother loses his lady love to sex trafficking but locates her in a brothel (“Don’t Stand So Close to Me” and “Roxanne” – respectively and obviously). In between, there are way too many random breaking solos.
But still, whether it’s the manifold charms of the featured performers or the well-mixed tape of Sting’s music, you’d have to be made of stone not to be moved.
