SPACE DOGS
Performed and Written by
Van Hughes and Nick Blaemire
Directed by Ellie Heyman
MCC Theatre
Reviewed by David Spencer
I’ve long since understood—and accepted, which is a little harder—that not everyone is going to follow in the footsteps of the greats of musical theatre, in terms of honoring received principles of craft; and more, not everyone can, or has the perspicacity to understand why they should (and having written extensively on it elsewhere, I won’t bang on about it here). The schism of the current generational divide—unlike any I’ve ever witnessed in the theatre, seeming less like a transition than a break—can at times exacerbate this (and I’ve also known it to serve as a deftly articulated cloak for laziness, but that’s another discussion too). Plus the Zeitgeist of the current multi-cultural shakeup, which, like all cultural shifts, can’t be assessed—only experienced and/or ridden—while it’s happening. And then of course there’s just the subgenre of rock musicals, good ol’ rock musicals, which goes back at least to 1967, whose tradition, to this very day, is that each one has to be assessed on its own terms, because each makes a point—sometimes a pretense—of bucking the system.
But the muddle of Space Dogs has none of that to fall back on as an excuse. Its joint composer/lyricist/librettist-performer/musicians, Van Hughes and Nick Blaemire, are two personable white guys near 40, who have been performing in the mainstream for many years, and they’ve taken as their subject matter the little known subject of the dog test subjects sent up in test rockets by Russians during the space race of the 1050s. And the presentation mode of the show is, these two guys have joined forces to show up and tell you about it, with a lot of low-tech gaggery and puppetry (the manipulation of stuffed dog toys) against a high tech bed of electronic sound and wall of electronic, manipulated projection, both newly created and drawn from newsreels.
The narrative, is unfortunately, an attenuated fact-sprawl whose center—an unnamed Russian scientist and his first-pioneer dog Laika—is far less a unifier than a recurring series of bits. And the score comes off as little more than setting Wikipedia facts to fairly generic rock music (that would have sounded exactly the same if written before either of these two guys was born) without much more than token effort to fashion them as functional theatre lyrics. On the one hand, the show is designed to seem kind of dashed off and unrestrained (even improvisatory) at times, and there’s nothing wrong with striving for that illusion. On the other hand, in Space Dogs, it doesn’t come off as illusion. It actually comes off as an educational musical originally aimed at children and tweens that just got ahead of its target and out of control.
To the degree that such can be traffic-managed, the coordination of tech and cast has been Space Dogs has been directed well enough by Ellie Heyman, and it must be said that, despite everything, Hughes and Blaemire are a personable duo, suited to an enterprise of this type. But they’re very much hampered by their own material.