Fly More Than You Fall At Southwark Playhouse
Fly More Than You Fall is a new musical about grief and acceptance. 15 year old Malia is an aspiring writer but whilst at writing camp she finds out that her mother has terminal cancer. The musical portrays how she both deals with this news as well as her life in the aftermath of her mothers death. Alongside this Malia is writing her book titled ‘Fly More Than You Fall’ about a bird named Willow who is struggling to fly and decides to climb a mountain, along the way meeting another bird, Flynn. As Malia’s grief goes through various stages the birds in her book take different approaches to the challenges they face, presenting metaphors for her loss.
The book is written by Eric Holmes with varying success, at times the moments are tender and emotive yet at other times the characters seem to drive the same point home and fail to develop into more interesting and engagingly drawn individuals. The first act suffers with ill considered pacing issues, the reveal about Malia’s mother’s terminal cancer comes before you have barely had a chance to discover much about the family and consequently much of Act 1 felt a bit stagnant with the same emotional points being hammered home. One success of the writing was the friendship portrayed between Malia and her friend she meets at summer camp, Caleb and as their friendship grows it hammers home that sometimes the subtlest of lines or concepts can have a big impact on the production. It was also a huge attraction that the book focused not on the grief and how to move on from this but the hope and growth that comes from the grief and learning to live with it.
The music by Nat Zegree and lyrics by Zegree and Holmes has a similar problem to the book. Some of the music was moving and really helps express the inner turmoil of Malia, her father Paul and mother Jennifer where as at other times it was repetitive and/or felt out of place in the piece. Many of the songs sounded similar and the few with a very different sound to them felt out of place.
A huge strength of Fly More Than You Fall was the cast. Robyn Rose-Li played Malia and she was the discovery of the night for me. I had not seen her perform before and after watching her I am sure that it will not be the last time I see her in a show either. Her voice shone, her characterisation was mature enough to avoid Malia coming across as selfish in difficult situations and she handled the topics sensitively and with wonderful range. Another wonderful performance was delivered by Max Gill as Caleb who was wickedly funny when required but also able to deliver some of the real emotional moments of the show.
The ‘big name’ of the production was Keala Settle and seeing her in such an intimate venue was a real bonus of the night. It is without question that Settle can sing but this part also showed that she has real versality and her moments on stage with Rose-Li were the moments that moved me the most throughout the show.
The set and costume design by Stewart J Charlesworth was full of pastel colours and the set covered in paper. Whilst the paper idea was effective to symbolise Malia’s writing the pastel colours struggles to sit with the themes of the show and the choice surrounding this was unclear.
Overall Fly More Than You Fall is a show with great potential and real heart along with a superb cast. With some tweaking of the book to help the pacing and focus along with consideration of the musical highlights this could really help the show fly rather than …yes you guessed it fall!
Fly More Than You Fall is on at Southwark Playhouse until 23rd November. You can find out more about the show and book tickets here.
If you like this review you might also like my review of Next to Normal, Hadestown and Mean Girls.