“Blood Brothers,” now at the Shubert Theatre, is more interesting as a show-business phenomenon than as a show.
Willy Russell’s 10-year-old, three-hour epic has been skewered by critics and plagued by its share of intermission walkouts. Nevertheless, Petula Clark and David Cassidy, who are on the tour, helped extend its Broadway run, and on the road, they’re meeting with similar passion, one felt for its earlier West End production as well. Two nearby ladies at Wednesday’s matinee wept at its shattering finale, and more than half of the audience leaped to their feet.
While hardly worth that, “Blood Brothers” is mistakenly dismissed, often by those unwilling (perhaps understandably) to see it to its conclusion. It is dramatically overwritten and musically underscored. It heaps didacticism and melodrama on a searing story of class exploitation, and it requires Cassidy and much of the chorus to frolic about-and even spit at one another-as 7-year-old children for most of Act One.
Then again, Russell is celebrated for encapsulating the wry resentment of the British lower class in small chamber pieces: “Educating Rita” and “Shirley Valentine.” He writes with the anger of the great social dramatists of his heritage, but usually with a cuddlier populism.
In “Blood Brothers,” he not only expands his canvas to a dozen characters, but, as songwriter, he throws in pop tunes too. He also feels deeply about the disadvantages dealt the have-nots versus the ease of the haves. That feeling energizes “Blood Brothers” just as his melodramatic lapses and puerile vulgarity often undo its dramaturgy and shortchange its musical moments.
His story, set in Liverpool from the early ’60s to 1978, tells of the Johnstone twins and of their single mother (Clark), who keeps one, Mickey (Cassidy) and gives up the other, Eddie (Tif Luckenbill), to her rich employer. As neighbors, the young twins meet and become best friends. Eddie’s family moves to the country; later the government relocates the on-the-dole Johnstones, too, and Mickey and Eddie become friends again.
In the sweeping Act Two, we follow them from pre-adolescence through young adulthood. Eddie goes to college, Mickey to the factory and a forced marriage with their mutual playmate, Linda. When recession hits, Mickey turns to crime, a prison term and drugs, and Linda turns to Eddie for help. Trapped, desperately jealous and drug-crazy, Mickey rages at Eddie in the finale, just as his mother warns, “Don’t kill him. He’s your twin brother. I gave him up at birth.” “Why,” Mickey laments, “didn’t you give me up instead?”
The varying responses to “Blood Brothers” might be attributable to its largely television sensibility. Though fraught with high-tech lighting and gamey theatrics, its plodding development and simplistic characterization resemble a mini-series. And though Russell was interested in using his genetic duality as a convention, undoubtedly he also strikes a nerve at a time when biological parents luridly vie with adoptive ones in courtrooms, when teens seem to be suing their biological parents all the time.
Clark is a great strength. Her milky, trademark coddling of a melody subliminally calls to mind the ’60s of much of the setting, and while still in full beauty, her voice is now seasoned with a bittersweet edge. Cassidy, though better than you might expect, doesn’t always manage to be convincing either as child or embittered derelict. But he fills the stage with energy (and with his fine voice in his vocal numbers). And in a work that somewhat tires both audience and actors, he’s successful as much for his endurance as his art.
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“Blood Brothers” plays through Oct. 9 at the Shubert Theatre, 22 W. Monroe St. Phone 312-902-1500.
