American Psycho The Musical review

After picking up nine Sydney Theatre Awards, this bold and provocative production is returning to Sydney. Alexander Berlage's staging premiered at Hayes Theatre Co in May 2019, and will have its return season at the Sydney Opera House in June 2020. Ben Gerrard will reprise his role as Patrick Bateman alongside a company of new and returning cast members.

American Psycho
, written by Bret Easton Ellis (“
the thinking man’s shock jock
”) is brutal. A once-banned novel that now has some currency as a social satire, it’s the story of Patrick Bateman, an investment banker dripping in designer gear and the blood of his victims. Yes, his life is so empty that he gets his kick from brutal murder. His targets are largely women and their deaths are sickening, but the male business rival who has a better business card and the coveted Fisher account could also be getting the actual axe.

If you remember Bateman, you’re more likely to do so because of the 2000 film, written by queer actor and writer Guinevere Turner and directed by Mary Harron. The two massaged the empty cruelty of the novel into commentary on toxic masculinity while skewering Ellis’s clearer targets: American excess, narcissism and greed.

The sharpened satire of the film and the dreamy, near-mastubatory effect of the book collide in
American Psycho The Musical
, which had a successful run in London before bombing on Broadway. Written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and with songs by Duncan Sheik, the show struggled to find itself.
The New York Times called
the musical’s tone “terminally undecided” – that it “suffer[ed] under the weight of having  to be a big Broadway musical.”

A musical that doesn’t know how to tell its story is a guaranteed flop. While you can’t erase Ellis’ cruelty from the text – even now, in its third iteration – you can mitigate, interrogate and subvert it. Thank god, then, that in its Australian premiere, the musical has landed in the hands of director Alexander Berlage and found a home at the Hayes Theatre, an intimate playing space that affords directors with the grace to explode a show and stitch it back together to re-discover its soul.

Berlage performed a similar spiritual surgery on
Cry-Baby

last year at the Hayes, draining its excess sentimentality and stitching it back up with queer anarchy to great acclaim.
American Psycho
is only Berlage’s second musical (he’s also a lighting designer, responsible for the cutting, heart-throbbing lighting track for this show) but with it he cements his place as a talented surgeon: slicing through unnecessary sentiment to get to the ugly but essential beating heart of the piece.

This is both critical and restorative work. Take the moment when Bateman and a pal go to the Tunnel, a New York City nightclub, to score cheap cocaine and get fucked up. The Broadway musical played it dark and subdued – another example of upper-class excess. But the Tunnel is an important landmark of queer history and culture: RuPaul used to perform there around the time
American Psycho
is set, and it was a landmark of the Club Kid era, before the underground became commoditised. Berlage zeroes in on this and reminds us that Bateman, and those like him, were invading and desecrating queer spaces, harassing queer patrons and assuming superiority over them – and this adds a new layer to Bateman’s treatment of Luis (Liam Nunan), whose sexual advances leave him uneasy. At the Tunnel, costume designer Mason Browne dresses his cast in club-kid inspired costumes (there are
direct visual references to Leigh Bowery
) and Berlage stages snapshots from the queer dancefloor.

With just this scene, Berlage explodes
American Psycho’s
name-dropping of a bygone era and repositions our view, giving it new meaning. Ellis’ text is still violent and flawed and has an uneasy relationship with itself, but Berlage throughout takes it down while honouring whatever might still be valuable.

The musical, under Berlage, is more misanthropic than it is misogynist, and everything deemed valuable onstage – looks, wealth, heterosexuality, capitalist greed – is eventually cut down. Bateman (Ben Gerrard, relentlessly tense and charismatic) stalks the stage that turns on a similarly restless revolve. He is a monster of consumption. Aguirre-Sacasa’s book makes some attempt to soften Bateman, but Gerrard bats those moments away; we’re not asked to do the impossible and care for him and the production is better for it.

The cast is stacked with musical theatre performers who are magnetic presences and strong actors: Blake Appelqvist, Erin Clare, Shannon Dooley, Eric James Gravolin, Amy Hack, Loren Hunter, Julian Kuo, Kristina McNamara, Liam Nunan and Daniel Raso.

While Aguirre-Sacasa’s book isn’t as good to women as it thinks it is – all named female characters are underwritten and two-dimensional – Berlage’s direction interrogates those choices. Special mention must be made of Erin Clare, who turns a role riddled with clichés – the recognisable ‘ditz’ – into something that’s much closer to high art.

The cast are all working under the same comic time signatures, and the book moves at a cracking pace; the dialogue is buzzy, even when it’s clunky, and the twist of irony Berlage has threaded through their performances is always clear.

This rapid-fire treatment doesn’t just set a strong pace for us, but a
new
pace for the musical itself. Musical director Andrew Worboys, working via single sound design (there’s no live band), has created new arrangements, and a sharper sonic landscape, than the original cast recording. As a result, the show moves differently – and in musicals, movement and the shape of music is everything. Sheik’s score blends ‘80s pop hits with his own numbers; it’s more atmospheric than plot-driven. It’s sonically overwhelming (on opening night my seat vibrated in time with the bass) but in all the right ways, and because the arrangements were written in response to the voices in the rehearsal room, this is a rare score in Australian musical theatre that, while not originated here, feels responsive to its local cast. (Those voices are otherworldly – when the ensemble rises and blends into a haunting cover of Phil Collins’ ‘In the Air Tonight’, you might just get chills).

In conversation with the direction, design (that revolve, and the mirrored minimalist set, is exactingly, smartly designed by Isabel Hudson) and Worboys’ bold music is the choreography, and Yvette Lee has done astonishing work here: every moment is a knife sluicing through the air, every step so dripping in satire you could write a thesis on it.

Berlage can’t entirely fix the musical’s flaws: the character of Jean, Bateman’s secretary, is so earnest she’s essentially constantly degraded (though this production does its best to give her dignity), and the book gets weaker as the show barrels towards its conclusion. And in 2019, this era still owns us (Bateman’s personal hero? Donald Trump) so can we really attack it and laugh at it when we’re still in its pocket? And these core fantasies of murdering women are hard to bear in a country where 18 women have been killed by male violence this year.

But this is a remarkable attempt to turn
American Psycho
from causing harm into a rejection of those who would revel in it. They’ve even cut down the blood so you can’t get off on it. Ellis would probably hate it. Thank god.