Jenny McKillop and Garett Ross in Rob and Chris (Bobby + Tina) – a new musical, Plain Jane Theatre. Photo by Ryan Parker.

Rob and Chris (Bobby + Tina) – a new musical

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The couple we meet in this wonderful new musical adaptation of Collin Doyle’s hit play Let The Light of Day Through — by the playwright and a remarkable young composer/songwriter Matt Graham — know what it’s like to live on the widening, scary fault line between “who we are” and “who we were.”

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Rob and Chris (Garett Ross and Jenny McKillop) were once Bobby and Tina, who fell in love in Grade 11, high school kids whose lives changed when Tina got pregnant. They had a baby even before they graduated. Now just in their 30s they’ve struggled to survive a fathomless grief by making themselves a comedy to be playful in. They try to amuse each other by arranging assignations for afternoon nookie in “sexy trashy” motels (standards: no bugs, no hair, no dead crack whores under the bed). And to keep the door to the past — the mystery room in their house and the great tragedy inside — closed, they wonder about starting again, “flying the coop,” selling their house, moving somewhere new. They think about how (and why) to keep being a couple when they’re different people now; does love wear itself out, long term, floundering in despair?

Rob and Chris play themselves at every stage of their relationship, as well as each other’s parents (they’re funny satirists), real estate agents, their kid Ben at many ages. I’m telling you all this first so you’ll appreciate the challenge involved in making a beautiful, funny, heartbreaking play into a beautiful, funny, heartbreaking musical. If you’re wondering if the musical theatre is up to this kind of complexity, wonder no more.

It’s in progress, as the creators have emphasized, as they cut and add songs. But Graham, a musical theatre songwriter of startling resourcefulness, who plays live at the keyboard, has a kind of fluency with complicated thoughts that turn witty in his lyrics. And they’re placed at meaningful moments. Motifs, including a silvery little riff that’s a pinch of memory perhaps, recur. Rob and Chris, turning over thoughts of moving to Montreal, or Florida!, get a fun and wry little Graham song about that.

The opening musical gambit, Prelude: The Door, is a little gem, portentous but with lightness. The recurring lullaby, gets increasingly poignant on each repetition. Would a song about going to university, when you have a baby and you’re living in your parents’ basement, be possible maybe?

Kate Ryan’s Plain Jane production, with its dramatic Trent Crosby lighting, stars two actors with powerfully convincing chemistry: Ross and McKillop are real-life husband and wife. McKillop is the more impulsive Chris; Ross has a kind of rueful, tentative quality that is the perfect complement.

Anyhow, these are first thoughts about a new musical that is open enough to include the arc attached to huge, life-changing heartbreak, with songs that approach obliquely, never a head-on assault in order to be moving, often with humour — just like Doyle’s writing.

Rob and Chris (Bobby + Tina) is on its way. And the Fringe is for shows like that. You shouldn’t miss the chance to see it.