The Light Years

Flat, Dull, Tedious, Disappointing, Ambitious
   

See it if
You have patience for a leaden show that has none of the awe, wonder & spectacle it tries to conjure & tie to hope, dreams, failure & time.

Don't see it if
You're wanting resolutions, least of all happy ones, in any of its three parallel narrative arcs of ambition, aspiration, hope and failure.


​Browning's line about "reach exceeding grasp" applies not only to the central characters here, but as well to the collaborative team that devised its script. 

The many interesting, myriad & serendipitous facts they’ve uncovered about time, stars, the world's fairs of the 19th & 20th Centuries, the aspirations & light that connect them all might, in other hands, have resulted in a theatrical moment that astonishes, the stuff of Stoppard or Sondheim, but here fall flat: collaborators too taken with the results of their research; what feels like a concept in search of a plot.

There aren't nearly enough sparkly lights to coax wonder out of this story of aspiring failure — though even inexpensive xmas lights over audience & house would have helped considerably. Delight's an ephemeral thing, but a nudge towards childhood can often whisk us back pretty quickly.

The cast does what it can with the material, while set & light design could have done with fewer props & more soaring imagination

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