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Though it possess a fair number of virtues, Nevermore, which just opened at New World Stages, forgets this lesson too often for its own good. Jonathan Christenson's rich but distancing musical biography of Poe, which originated at Edmonton's Catalyst Theatre and played at New York's New Victory Theatre in 2010, dedicates itself to all the most unsettling, disturbing, and flat-out macabre elements of Poe's personality and writings, and examines how his tortured upbringing influenced them. But it gets so wrapped up in itself that it never creates the conditions necessary to let us in. Told as a rough flashback, as Poe (Scott Shpeley) looks back on his history in his final moments, it reveals how the man was affected by abandonment (his father left when he was young, and he was separated from his brother and sister not soon after), death (both his mother, foster mother, child cousin-bride, and numerous others), betrayal (his once-loving foster father rebelled against his financial choices and cut him out of his will), and, perhaps worst of all, the violent expectations of sudden success (upon publishing "The Raven"). It's an impressively complete, low-fat rendering that moves with well-greased speed through the four decades and dozens of too-tumultuous events of the world according to Poe. There's an attitude about the evening, however, that works against Christenson's good intentions. The style of everything—Christenson's book, music, lyrics, and direction; Laura Krewski's nightclub-strut choreography; and Bretta Gerecke's design of sets, costumes, and lights—is steampunk Goth rock–meets–children's theatre–meets–music hall, with an appliqué of ghoulish winking that prevents you from caring about anyone or anything. Poe is a troubled rebel with an Ed Grimley hair spike, the male authority figures are pseudo-Brechtian globe-swallowers, the females are so condescendingly kittenish that it seem as though they want to be considered girls rather than women. Christenson spares no expense with this exploration of the artist's psyche; clearly, everything is shown us as Poe would (ostensibly) see it. But it's overkill, and we don't learn much from it; the heavy-sell scoring and strands of a book composed with weak-tea, poorly scanned, and overly sing-songy imitations of Poe's verse style don't help. And if Shpeley is somehow superb at fitting in with the surrounding strangeness, the same is not quite true of his six cast mates; Gaelan Beatty, Shannon Blanchet, Beth Graham, Ryan Parker, Garrett Ross, and Lindsie VanWinkle are all talented and hard-working as they play numerous ghostly roles in the saga, but their characters are too divorced from recognizable people to overcome the presentation boundaries Christenson has erected before them. Despite all this, Nevermore is always watchable and even compelling—at the performance I attended, the rest of the audience seemed as riveted as I was—and adorned with a few excellent ideas. Krewski's sliding-panel set allows for a number of delicious crossfade-style effects as we float down Poe's stream of consciousness. And the Raven that haunts Poe, both before and after he gives it literally life, is beautifully and chillingly anthropomorphized with full-body costumes that soon consume the whole cast and plunge you into the same terror experienced by that poem's unnamed narrator. But you don't feel the same from the show as a whole; it tries so hard to make its subject "interesting" that it never lets his trademark uniqueness shine through. Take on any one of Poe's works—I'd recommend "The Cask of Amontillado" or "Annabel Lee"—and you'll instantly recognize an undeniably human man who's obviously at odds with a delicate society. But there's no way to see what really made Poe special when Nevermore makes everything around him just as weird as he was.
Nevermore —The Imaginary Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe
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