Tuesday, July 22, 2014

The Atomic Bomb Set To Rock Music

When I told my mom I was seeing a new musical Atomic (she likes to hear about the shows I see), she said, "Like the atomic bomb?" and laughed, thinking it couldn't actually be about that. But I explained that I was indeed seeing a musical about the atomic bomb, or at least about the team of scientists who developed it as part of the government-funded Manhattan Project.
Photo credit: Carol Rosegg
But as unlikely a topic as it may seem for a musical, there's a lot of rich material. Perhaps too much. The book by Danny Ginges and Gregory Bonsignore mostly focuses on Leó Szilárd (Jeremy Kushnier), whose discovery of the nuclear chain reaction was crucial to building the bomb, but it also packs a lot in--a framing device in which J. Robert Oppenheimer (Euan Morton) is giving testimony at the Atomic Energy Commission hearings and even the love story between Leó and his wife Trude (Sara Gettelfinger). As a result, it doesn't give each adequate space and it sometimes feels unfocused. Atomic is at its best when exploring the ethical questions (Should the bomb have been dropped even though the war was essentially over? Did they save even more lives in the long run than they took?) and the psychological effects on the team after the dropping of the bomb.

The music by Philip Foxman, who co-wrote lyrics with Ginges and Bonsignore is generic rock and all the songs sound pretty similar, but the cast, which also includes David Abeles as Arthur Compton, the leader of the project, and Jonathan Hammond as a sex-crazed Enrico Fermi, really brings it vocally, especially Kushnier. It's unfortunate that Morton only had one song, but he makes for a fun narrator. You could do a lot worse for a summer musical.

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