“Wild Child,” the world premiere musical that opened last weekend at Laguna Playhouse, is thoroughly contemporary: from its premise of teenagers adversely affected by online gaming to its high-tech production values.
It is also decidedly old-school, in that it is an earnest, heartfelt, irony-free show that achieves two things in short supply in so much contemporary entertainment: It generates empathy for its characters and there is a palpable sense of joy in its storytelling.
It is also capable of producing a whole lot of head-scratching, from the irony of its criticism of the very technology that is part of its creative DNA, to the way it soft-pedals the very real ethical concerns surrounding wilderness therapy, a controversial practice that the musical essentially asks us to accept as a force for healing.
The Plot & Production
“Wild Child” follows Rina (Salina Gangani) and Darin (Davide Costa), two teenagers who know each other only through their avatars in an online video game. They don’t realize that connection when they separately wind up at New Roots, a wilderness therapy camp in the Utah backcountry. Removed from their phones, their online lives and pretty much everything familiar, they are put through a regimen of hiking, journaling and group therapy designed to force them to confront the problems that landed them there.
As they become friends in the real world, they and the other four teens are guided by two camp counselors: good-cop Whitney (a radiant Jennifer Noble) and the more military boot camp-oriented Collins (a suitably gruff but ultimately soft-hearted Chad Doreck).
Directed by John Simpkins, the production makes the collision between those two worlds highly theatrical. Michael Schweikardt’s scenic design, augmented by projections by Nathan Scheuer and Cat Wilson, transforms the stage into Utah’s backcountry and the game’s fantastical landscape. The canyon walls, rainbows and Milky Way are spectacular, giving the show a visual grandeur that occasionally threatens to overwhelm the story. The avatars themselves are an especially theatrical touch, with Perrault’s guitar-slinging warrior Roses and Whitehill’s catlike Kiton appearing as physical manifestations of the online identities Rina and Darin have created.
The cast is equally committed. Gangani and Costa make Rina and Darin appealing without overselling their troubles, while the ensemble brings considerable energy to the songs. There is no wink here, no suggestion that the show’s earnestness is something to be embarrassed about. Its faith in the restorative powers of journaling, nature and human connection is entirely sincere and, at times, genuinely moving.
Sincere but Problematic
But that sincerity also exposes one of the show’s biggest weaknesses. New Roots isn’t simply a place these kids go to get better. They have been sent there. Some have been forcibly removed, if not downright kidnapped (with parental consent), from their homes and placed in a highly regimented program in which they hike as much as 10 miles a day and undergo therapy under the authority of adults they have not voluntarily submitted to. Yet the musical never really confronts the coercion at the heart of that arrangement.
The kids complain and occasionally push back, but their resistance never develops into a serious challenge to the program itself. Instead, New Roots largely proves its case. The kids open up, relationships form and, for the most part, they seem to have taken credible steps along the healing process. Even Collins, whose approach is considerably harsher than Whitney’s, ultimately functions less as an antagonist than as another representative of a system the musical wants us to trust.
That’s a curious choice for a story built around teenagers being stripped of their phones, their homes and their usual means of escape. The musical has created a potentially potent conflict: Whether forcibly removing troubled kids from their lives can itself cause harm — then largely walks around it.
Lack of Central Conflict
The musical’s book, written by Dan Marshall, has other issues. This is a show in which healing, the transformative power of nature and group connection are championed, but it falls short in arguably the most important element of dramatic storytelling: conflict. The teen campers are conflicted, but their conflicts rarely develop into meaningful dramatic opposition.
The closest thing the story has to a central external conflict involves Fitz (Matthew Fedorek), a wealthy kid with a predilection for pills whose parents are the only ones in the group who don’t write to him. He forms a largely one-sided bond with Rina and hatches a plan to escape the camp by running away with her. The possibility surfaces periodically but is mostly left hanging until the climax, when, spurred on by their online avatars, Rina and Darin attempt to become real-life heroes.
The resolution seems less organic than a rather contrived way to bring the swashbuckling avatars back onstage.
Character Issues
All the performers are beautifully voiced, even if the score’s 24 pop-rock-inflected songs (lyrics by Marshall, music by Julianne Wick Davis) are rather indistinguishable, and they are fine actors, breathing inner life into characters who, with the exception of Gangani’s Rina, aren’t given a great deal of onstage solo time. But for most of them, it’s not quite clear what is so troubled about them that would warrant being sent to what amounts to a wilderness black-ops program.
The supporting characters don’t seem all that troubled. Lynds (an ebullient Amanda Angeles) is there because she spends too much time on social media. Rina has missed some school. Darin stays home most of the time. Tom, a drug addict played with comic flair by Jacob Zelonky, begins the weeks-long program five days sober. Fitz, meanwhile, is the only other kid who seems clearly troubled enough to warrant being sent away.
But the real question mark surrounds Phoenix (Gabby Dahlen), a 3.8-GPA student who has been exiled from their home for apparently no greater sin than being gender-fluid — a potentially devastating family rupture that the show treats with the emotional weight of a trip to summer camp. Phoenix seems remarkably well-adjusted about the whole thing, leaving us to wonder why they are at New Roots in the first place.
It feels less like a group of troubled teenagers than a checklist of contemporary adolescent problems: isolation, check; drug addiction, check; too much online distraction, check; gender identity, check. The issues are all serious enough on their own. But by cramming them into the same wilderness therapy program without giving most of the characters much dramatic resistance or complexity, the musical sometimes makes its troubled-kid roster feel assembled rather than lived in.
The Creative Force Behind the Musical
And then there is The Breathe Project, the creative force behind “Wild Child.” It describes itself as an “independent creative studio” that develops interconnected stories across multiple forms while exploring subjects including identity, mental health, human rights, social justice and the environment.
As advocates and catalysts for change, Breathe seems above reproach. And its creative strategy with this musical is striking: “Wild Child” is conceived not simply as a musical but as an interconnected intellectual property. The digital album “Roses/Half Full,” which debuted a year ago, tells the story of Roses after wilderness therapy and was initially presented as the work of a singer who appeared to be a real recording artist. It wasn’t until much later that the connection to the fictional “Wild Child” universe was revealed. There is also a graphic novel that expands the story into another medium.
‘Wild Child’
When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday-Friday; 2 & 7:30 p.m. Saturday; 1 p.m. Sunday, through Oct. 4.
Where: Laguna Playhouse, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach
Tickets: $86-$131, $10 student tickets available one hour before curtain pending availability
More Info: 949-497-2787, www.lagunaplayhouse.com
Again: ingenious marketing. But that ambition seems to have seeped into the musical itself – to its detriment at times. The avatars, the video-game world and the elaborate projections don’t always feel like organic elements of the story. At times, they seem less like dramatic necessities than pieces of a larger entertainment ecosystem that need to be introduced, developed and ultimately paid off. The climax, in particular, feels as if the story has to find a reason to bring the avatars back onstage.
And that creates an interesting contradiction. “Wild Child” wants to show us the limitations of a generation raised on screens, yet the project itself uses the tools of contemporary digital entertainment to construct an interconnected world around the musical. The technology the characters are asked to leave behind is also the machinery through which their story has been packaged, expanded and marketed.
“Wild Child” may want to show us how its characters can break free, but ultimately it never quite breaks free of its own carefully constructed universe.
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