Adding Machine - Finborough 28 Sept to 22 Oct

It's an expressionist musical with a dense and, I would say, difficult score. It falls into the same category as O'Neil's Hairy Ape as it's about the soul-less drudgery of labour and working class life in America in the 20s - in this case the life of an accountant - but it offers some relief in that there's a beautiful little love story at the heart of it. I saw a production in LA a few years ago and liked it a lot. There's an OCR to listen to if you're interested.

I saw this last night, a great production of a fascinating piece of music theatre that falls into the category of Expressionist Musical, a category pretty much unoccupied unless you call The Threepenny Opera expressionist.

Elmer Rice's play, famous in its day, was written in 1923, one year after O'Neill's The Hairy Ape, and it's not dissimilar in its heavy symbolism and its concentration on the oppression of the working class. But whereas O'Neill's work remains solidly earthbound and grim, Rice's play takes off into metaphysics and fantasy, its plot making the prodigious leap, via a short series of scenes, from a New York tenement to the Elysian Fields, literally. The highly original conclusion it comes to is an explanation for the persistence of the class system, of the haves and have-nots in this world (Rice was an ardent Leftist) that is, at the same time, crazily fanciful and strangely plausible.

But this is not the play, it's the musical, faithfully based on it, written by Joshua Schmidt. It had a successful off-Broadway run in 2008 and produced a cast recording which is well work hearing. Because it's so true to the material it's not easy listening. The protagonist, Mr. Zero, is an accountant and (as his name implies) it's a show about numbers. In the workplace, roboticized clerks recite sums and figures in a rhythmic frenzy reminiscent of the music of Philip Glass and John Adams, the numbers both oppressing and sustaining them. But for Mr. Zero it all comes crashing down when, instead of an expected promotion for his 25 years of loyal service, he finds he's to be replaced by an adding machine. The story goes from there.

The real adding machine is not the little box with levers and keys, it's Zero himself. Stuck fast in a miserable life - bad job, bad marriage - he is without imagination. He and his friends are narrow minded bigots, mouthing platitudes, entirely closed to anything beyond the daily grind. He cannot even respond to love when it is offered by a fellow office worker, Daisy. He doesn't see it because he's not looking for it. But his opportunity for escape comes in the most bizarre of plot twists and the question the show asks is can he rise to salvation even then?

As noted, this is a first class production - as usual for the Finborough. The seven person cast is uniformly excellent, some great voices among them. Joseph Alessi, as Zero, does not have a great voice but he's a powerful actor and, with his intense mixture or rage and befuddlement, he anchors the show. Joanna Kirkland is a lovely Daisy and delivers the show's big love song, "I'd Rather Watch You", beautifully.

Josh Seymour's staging is highly inventive and right and the 3 piece band - piano, synth and percussion - plays this difficult, complex score with apparent ease.

So this is not going to be for everyone but for those with a bit of adventure in their soul, I'd recommend it. It's doing well at the box office, I was told, and a couple of more shows have been added. It runs for 95 minutes straight through, no interval.