Review: Night Side Songs, the Sing-Along Cancer Musical

I clenched up a bit in the opening moments of Night Side Songs, the new musical by Daniel and Patrick Lazour, now at LCT3. “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship,” says Mary Testa, quoting the first line of Susan Sontag’s 1978 treatise Illness as Metaphor (which ironically begins with a mixed metaphor). It’s a worryingly academic way to start a musical, a literal thesis stated at the top of this 90-minute show about a woman’s struggle with cancer.

But my initial fear was misplaced. Night Side Songs is mostly heart with just a smattering of brains. In fact, it is so driven by emotion that we occasionally leave the realm of narrative logic and reason. But when you’re musicalizing the universal human experience of sickness, it is a safe assumption that viewers will fill in the plot holes with their own pain.

The story is about 41-year-old Yasmine (Brooke Ishibashi). Her doctor (Robin de Jesús) diagnoses her with cancer, news that she receives first with rage and then a stoic sadness. Her mother (Testa) worries about her being alone and reintroduces Frank (Jonathan Raviv), a somewhat prickly academic whom Yasmine once dated (it didn’t go anywhere). But it turns out that the second time is a charm, and Frank becomes Yasmine’s constant companion through this difficult time.

The Lazours (best known for the Egyptian revolution musical We Live in Cairo) present this tale with Brechtian flair. The actors step out the scene to comment on the story and take on multiple tertiary roles (including gossipy women sipping martinis during the number “The Reason,” a biting commentary on our very American habit of ascribing blame for illness). A fifth actor, Kris Saint-Louis, plays multiple roles in addition to the cello and guitar, joining music director Alex Bechtel (at the piano) to provide instrumental accompaniment for this intimate chamber musical.

Taibi Magar directs a nimble staging on Matt Saunders’s versatile set, which has transformed the Claire Tow Theater into a thrust arrangement with audience on three sides of the stage in what feel like elevated pews. Amith Chandrashaker lights the space with sensitive precision, so the various jump-cuts and dimension shifts of this musical feel seamless and natural. Sound designer Justin Stasiw has beautifully engineered the amplification so we don’t miss a lyric, a heroic feat when the actors move all around us and we serve as the chorus.

That’s the most daring element of Night Side Songs: The smiling actors hand us songbooks before the show and we are invited to sing along to the refrains of certain songs. It starts simply enough with “Glow Glow Glow,” in which we just hum. De Jesús conducts the audience, gesturing toward himself to first demonstrate a line, then gesturing toward us to join. When it works, it creates the warm fuzzies of community one rarely feels outside of church or a piano bar. I was particularly swept away by the number “Let’s Go Walking,” its lift and drive capturing the comfort of knowing you have someone to walk beside you and listen.

Far more challenging is “When You…,” with more complicated lyrics like, “When your views offended my best friend / When you couldn’t quite pull off that fashion trend.” These (occasionally) rhyming couplets conjure specific images of the friction that is inevitable in any relationship, but they’re a heavy lift for the audience, with many giving up by the end.

However, this stalwart cast never does, and few forces offer more encouragement to keep going than Testa’s pealing voice just feet away from you (as always, she takes her character and makes it her own, with perfect line readings and lyrical interpretations). Not only does de Jesús prove to be a generously commanding choir director, he also summons our hearts into our throats during his performance of “Miracle Song,” in which he plays the mother of a child with cancer, pulling a fuzzy brown cardigan over her body like it is armor (subtle and effective costume design by Jason A. Goodwin). Raviv gets the right mix of sweet and salty as Frank. And Ishibashi gives a beautifully sympathetic performance as Yasmine, her quiet stillness as she shuffles hospital bills giving us all an opportunity to reflect on the cruelty of monetized medicine. She lets us do the raging for her.

The Lazours are undoubtedly talented songwriters and they know it, sometimes to the detriment of their storytelling. The song “Santa Cruz,” a musical suicide note from the ex-boyfriend of Yasmine’s uncle’s best girlfriend (I think I got that right) has only a tenuous connection to the plot, with all the hallmarks of a beloved trunk song that should have stayed there. But Saint-Louis still sings it with a gentle melancholy that lingers long after the final bow.

The creative team behind Night Side Songs is obviously wagering that the audience will arrive with its own baggage when it comes to illness, recovery, and relationships. And when death and sickness come for us all, that’s a safe bet. While we are still here and healthy, we might as well lift our voices in song.