REVIEW: I & You (Olney Theatre Company)

I love a good homecoming! More than a decade after its rolling world premiere as a straight play, I and You returns to MoCo with an ampersand, a musical score, and a much bigger roof over its head, taking up their mainstage instead of the original Mulitz-Gudelsky Theatre Lab.

Book/Music

Everyone meet Caroline. She’s in her room. She’s not at school like other teenagers in her cohort, though, but she’s got a good excuse: an unnamed, likely terminal disease keeps her largely stuck at home. The insular, accepting life she’s made for herself gets a bit of a shakeup when a random boy barges into her room one day. Anthony here is a fellow student, who’s been assigned to be her partner in an English assignment about venerated American poet Walt Whitman. It’s a bit unclear why she wasn’t alerted to the arrival of this random man in her house — much less her room — but alas! It does takes some persuasion but she ends up permitting him and his very poorly done trifold presentation stay a bit. Especially when it comes to light that it’s due tomorrow.

This sort-of-not-quite Fault In Our Starsy premise barging in is a tough sell initially, but the teenlike banter and quasi-maturity of the characters level things a bit. Caroline, justifiably cynical, warms up believably over the one-act show, and Anthony develops layers of his own, and by the end — which has a major twist that I won’t spoil — each feel like fully realized, fulfilling characters. That score, by Ari Asfer, I mentioned? It…exists. I can’t honestly say it did much to push the experience along that much, but it does make the story grab more of your attention. The songs aren’t the best you’ll ever hear but they aren’t un-enjoyable. And with the state of some modern musicals, that’s an achievement of its own—but it made me wonder why the play needed one. 5/10

Acting

Alex De Bard’s sourly charming Caroline is the bedrock of the production. The material allows her to take center stage in material that benefits from a healthily-sung angst, and is complemented by a smoothly awkward J. Antonio Rodriguez who later morphs into a more grown, rounded presence. 8/10

Production

Sarah Rasmussen’s direction has a crystalline vision, but I couldn’t help but feel like the venue was oversized; Beowulf Boritt’s set is basically just Caroline’s immaculately-decorated bedroom (think: Olivia Rodrigo posters, stuffed animals abound, the scattered presence of a teenager). To fill the space, it is flanked by two massive black curtains, which over the course of the musical light up with some fantastical projections from Japhy Weideman, including an eye-catching camera-feed scene towards the end. 6/10

Viz

And thanks, Olney, for letting the audience sit and take in that set before things get going. There’s a lot of detail in Caroline’s room that feed into her character long before you meet her, and it lets you feel like you know her before she says a word. The bare curtains next to the small house in center stage let you absorb it even more. 8/10

Verdict

I & You is a new musical full of heart, but one that doesn’t entirely feel like a necessary musical effort when its material was good enough sans-score. 27/40