The Act 1 set-up of the musical Dogfight takes too long, the premise is off-putting, and the story doesn’t hit a persuasive groove until Act 2. On the upside, Dogfight is the inaugural production of JBM Theatre, a new local company dedicated to producing musical theatre, and it features some talent worth watching.
This 2012 musical, which is based on the 1991 movie that starred River Phoenix and Lili Taylor, is set in 1963. Three young Marines, who are on a 24-hour leave in San Francisco before they deploy to Okinawa then Vietnam, decide to stage a “dogfight”, a party at which they’ll compete to bring the ugliest date. Eddie, the protagonist, picks up a waitress named Rose who wants to be a folk singer. When Eddie realizes that Rose doesn’t deserve what’s coming, he tries to divert her from the party, but she’s excited about being on her first date and wants to go, so Eddie caves.
Do you see what I mean about this being hard to get into? Despite his feeble protests, Eddie is being an asshole. His friends are being assholes. It’s painfully obvious that, at least in the short term, things are not going to go well. And we’re five numbers into Dogfight before the central Eddie/Rose story finally starts to emerge. Before then, we’re just watching a series of songs that set up the situation but have zero narrative drive. At the end of Act 1, Rose finally realizes what’s up and let’s Eddie have it. Okay, but no surprises there.
It isn’t until Act 2, when Eddie tries to apologize to Rose and a tender romance emerges that Dogfight finally achieves some emotional resonance. And that’s driven deeper by Eddie’s traumatic deployment and its aftermath.
Appropriately, most members of this cast are young. Trained at institutions including Sheridan College, Capilano University, and Studio 58, they must be relatively recent graduates. Keep that in mind as you read my assessments of their performances.
James Ross is never entirely credible as the kind of jarhead who would go along with a dogfight in the first place. He always feels too sweet for that. But Ross does get across Eddie’s butch bafflement, his period-perfect emotional illiteracy, as the story progresses. Ross’s clear tenor, his stage presence, and dancer’s chops add up to an impressive package of talent.
Julia MacLean is also persuasive as Rose and her voice is particularly appealing in the warmth of its lower register.
I also appreciated the performances of the actors playing Eddie’s buddies: the dangerous swagger of Connor Hawkins’s Boland and desperate performance of masculinity in Caleb Dyks’s Bernstein.
Some members of the cast run into trouble in their higher registers, but mostly the singing it tight. I particularly enjoyed the guys in “We Three Bees” and Rose and Eddie in “First Date/Last Night”.
I started off pretty stoney in my response to this production but, because of its significantly greater resonance — the tenderness of a young romance, the devastation of the Vietnam War — Act 2 moved me to tears.
A couple more notes.
Even for a young company with a tight budget, the set shouldn’t be an afterthought.
And there’s a weird conundrum at the heart of this show: How do you present the supposedly ugly young women? In this production, director Cathy Wilmot has turned them into caricatures: squinty-eyed, slope-shouldered, bucktoothed. I think that’s a mistake. Surely the point is that these young women are every bit as attractive as the young men, who can’t appreciate that truth because they’re arrogant pricks. As a director, you might want to acknowledge the reasons these guys would pick on these particular women — maybe eccentricities in hairstyle or clothing. But turning them into cartoons, as Wilmot has done here, creates an incoherent stage reality.
Final note: choreographer Jamie MacLean also proves she’s a talent worth watching. Her manipulation of the chairs in “Some Kinda Time”, and the zippy footwork for the Marines in “Hey, Good Lookin’’: you go, girl!
DOGFIGHT Book by Peter Duchan. Music and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. Directed by Cathy Wilmot. A JBM Theatre at the Waterfront Theatre until October 18. Tickets and information.
PHOTO CREDIT: (Photo of Julia MacLean and James Ross by Carlo Marchot)
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