#so he has to be unhinged. or delusional. or both. because otherwise it makes no sense

[mysterycitrus]

dear diary how do u write from jason todd’s perspective without sounding sincerely unhinged

[antialiasis]

Blood Brothers

So @elyvorg and I went to see the musical Blood Brothers!

elyvorg studied it in school, later grew to appreciate it as a story, and one day told me that as it happened there was going to be a performance of this musical she liked, and thought I might like too, near her around the time that I'd be visiting for the London Expo.

I had never heard of Blood Brothers, but I briefly looked at the introduction to the Wikipedia article, which was more apparently spoilery than I expected; it informed me that it's about twins separated at birth who become friends and are raised in different social classes, and that "They both fall in love with the same girl, causing a rift in their friendship and leading to the tragic death of both brothers." (elyvorg later informed me that their deaths aren't actually a spoiler; the show literally starts with them both dead before moving on to how this happened.) But overall, although I'm no big fan of love triangles, this otherwise sounded very me, and when elyvorg likes something I'm extremely likely to like it too, so I was thrilled to agree.

Blood Brothers spends a while at the beginning establishing how it came about that these twins were separated in the first place. Mrs. Johnstone, a working-class woman, has seven children with an eighth on the way after her husband walks out on her; she's worked out that they'll just barely be able to afford one more mouth to feed, but when she learns she's expecting twins, she begins to despair. Meanwhile, she's working as a cleaner for the middle-class wife of a factory owner, Mrs. Lyons, who is unable to have children. She'd like to adopt, but her husband is insistent that he only wants a child that's biologically his. When Mrs. Johnstone tells her about her worries about having twins, Mrs. Lyons sees an opportunity - what if Mrs. Johnstone simply gives Mrs. Lyons one of the children? As it happens her husband is away on a long trip, and the timing works out so that she could realistically have a baby at the same time Mrs. Johnstone is due, just before her husband returns. All she has to do is stuff her clothes in public to appear pregnant until then, and her husband will never have to know it's not their biological child. Mrs. Johnstone is resistant to the idea of giving away her child, but still imagines that Mrs. Lyons would be able to give the child a better life than she could, and Mrs. Lyons promises that she'll be able to see the child every day. Mrs. Johnstone tentatively agrees, but Mrs. Lyons can see her hesitation - and having learned earlier that Mrs. Johnstone is very superstitious, she makes her swear on the Bible that she will do this and never tell anyone.

Later, when the twins are born and the time has come to separate them, Mrs. Johnstone is again reluctant, but Mrs. Lyons reminds her that she swore on the Bible, and she relents - "Don't tell me which one, just take him!" Over the next months, Mrs. Lyons feels a growing, nagging insecurity every time Mrs. Johnstone interacts with the baby she knows is actually hers; she decides to fire her (but pay her off handsomely, so as to feel less bad about it). Mrs. Johnstone objects and says that if she's fired she will tell people - but in her desperation to get rid of her, Mrs. Lyons invents a superstition of her own: "You do know what they say about twins secretly parted, don't you? They say that if either twin learns that he was one of a pair, they shall both immediately die." And thus, the despairing Mrs. Johnstone leaves, petrified that if she ever lets her son find out about his twin brother, she'll be somehow killing them both.

At the start of all this, I felt like all this setup was somewhat unnecessary - surely a musical about twins being separated at birth doesn't need to spend quite so much time just justifying its concept, right? But this wasn't actually about justifying its concept. From this point, superstition is one of the big running themes of the story; Mrs. Lyons grows increasingly unhinged as she begins to believe in the fake twin superstition that she made up to manipulate Mrs. Johnstone with, and the musical's narrator sings several ominous interludes throughout themed around different superstitions and how "the devil's got your number".

In the meantime, though, the two boys (Mickey and Edward) grow up, meet as kids, impulsively swear to be blood brothers after talking for five minutes, and are generally both adorable. (Before the show began, there was an announcement that Mickey would be played by Sean Jones, which was met with cheers from the audience. Turns out he's one of the most iconic actors in the role, who was not actually part of this tour, but the actor who was supposed to play Mickey on the tour had a back injury, and at the matinee earlier that same day, the understudy had fallen ill in the middle of the show and they'd had to finish it with Edward's understudy, who hadn't rehearsed the part at all and had to just do his best with the aid of a script. With no Mickey for the evening show, then, they'd just called up one of the best Mickeys, who could probably play the part in his sleep even though it'd been a while, to step in on short notice. I guess we got pretty lucky.)

With Mickey growing up poor and lower-class and Edward rich and middle-class, the two seem very different, though in their innocence it doesn't matter much to them now. There's an adorable duet where Mickey admires stuff like how his friend is always so neat and tidy, and then Edward is equally excited about how his friend is always untidy. But even though it doesn't matter to them, it matters to the adults around them. The lower-class kids play rowdy outdoor cowboys-and-indians and gangster games - to a delightful song about how everything's a game and nothing has consequences, which reprises the same melody as the "devil's got your number" interludes, the ones about how everything has consequences that can't be escaped - while Edward's sheltered and coddled and expected to be still and proper, alone and friendless in a mansion. Mickey and his friend Linda boast of how if the police come they'll just take an attitude with them and say their name is Adolf Hitler; Edward takes them entirely at their word and delightedly mouths off at the police when they manage to break a window, only for Mickey and the Johnstones to be treated as dirty troublemakers and Edward to be let off with a gentle warning about not playing with those sorts of children, while the policeman has a drink at his parents' house. Society privileges Edward simply because of his background, plants the first seeds of how the world will treat them unfairly.

Their mothers both try hard to keep the two away from each other so they won't figure out they were twins, with Mrs. Lyons eventually persuading her husband to move away just so Edward can't see Mickey ever again. Eventually, though, as it happens Mrs. Johnstone gets rehomed to better social housing that's quite near to the Lyons' new home, and the brothers meet again as teenagers, rekindling their friendship. When Mrs. Lyons finds out, she confronts Mrs. Johnstone, convinced in her increasingly delusional paranoia that Mrs. Johnstone is following her, trying to haunt her and her son's life forever - and actually picks up a knife and makes a move to murder her. She fails and runs away, and has an emotional breakdown.

By this time, Linda goes to school with Mickey, and they're both obviously into each other but Mickey doesn't have the confidence to make a move on her even as she makes screamingly blatant moves on him. As the three of them spend their summers together, Edward develops feelings for Linda as well, though he recognizes what's going on between Linda and Mickey and doesn't want to get in the way; with his privileged and worriless upbringing, he's articulate and confident where Mickey's awkward and insecure, and he goes on to tell Linda (in song, because musical) that if he were Mickey he'd confess his love to her with full-on Shakespeare references (but he isn't, so he won't). If he were Mickey, he wouldn't be able to make any Shakespeare references - but Edward's a bit blind to his privilege.

Linda, for her parts, likes both of them - but as far as Edward is concerned Mickey was there first, and before he leaves for university, he encourages Mickey to finally ask her out. While Edward is in college, Linda becomes pregnant, she and Mickey hastily get married and they move in with Mrs. Johnstone - but shortly before Christmas, Mickey's factory job is made redundant in the recession. By the time Edward returns, with his rich college buddies, ready to celebrate Christmas with Mickey and Linda, Mickey's bitter, unemployed and starved for money. Edward's good fortune and effortless privileged living and his frightfully oblivious but well-meant comments about how really he'd love to be unemployed and free to do whatever he wants are grating and humiliating, and Mickey lashes out at him and decries the childishness of their blood brother thing (which Mickey had been the one to come up with, once upon a time). They part on bitter terms.

Later, with no jobs to be found, in his desperation to be able to support Linda and his daughter, Mickey helps his delinquent older brother commit an armed robbery, which goes wrong, and his brother shoots a man. As an accessory to the murder, Mickey is sentenced to seven years in prison; though he's released early for good behaviour, by the time he gets out he's haunted and despondent, emotionally closed off and severely depressed, unable to function without antidepressants. Linda, convinced the pills are what's making him so dead inside, tries to get him to stop taking them, but he adamantly refuses. In her desperation, Linda contacts Edward, who is now a councillor, and gets him to pull strings to get them a house and a job for Mickey - which Mickey instantly sees through. After an argument that leaves Linda broken, lonely and miserable and bereft of emotional support, she meets up with Edward. Their reunion is clearly emotional for them, and they still have romantic feelings for each other, but all they do in at least the staging we watched is just walk together, talking, hugging, a kiss on the cheek (it's a montage song, so not a literal real-time representation of what's happening, but I was expecting an actual romantic kiss and it didn't happen). But Mrs. Lyons, who hasn't been seen onstage since her murderous visit to Mrs. Johnstone's, witnesses them together and tells Mickey about it, implying they were having an affair.

This breaks Mickey. And it's not because this is a story about a love triangle, as the Wikipedia summary so tediously implied: it's because at this point Linda was the one thing he had left to cling to. Near the beginning, when about to give up her son, as her scant belongings are being repossessed to pay her debts, Mrs. Johnstone sings a song about how nothing's ever yours on easy terms. Mickey's grown up to have this same cruel realization, that nothing's ever his because of his class - not his belongings, not his job, not even his basic freedom or his ability to function and earn sustenance for his family. The only thing that's his is Linda and his child, and after his argument with Linda, in his fear of losing even that, he was actually so desperate he did skip taking the antidepressants like she wanted. But maybe Linda's just another thing that the rich can take away from him when they please, after all. Was the baby even his in the first place? Nothing's ever his. Edward gets to have things and be happy; Mickey doesn't.

So Mickey picks up his brother's old gun from the robbery and heads to the council offices, where Eddie is giving a speech. In very good sequence that is extremely #my buttons, Mickey points the gun at Edward, confronting him about the supposed affair. Edward insists that they're just friends - and at this Mickey really snaps, yells, grabs him and presses the gun to his head while Edward cowers. "Friends! I could kill you. We were friends, weren't we? Blood brothers, wasn't it? Remember? Well, how come you got everythin' and I got nothin'?"

When he gets to whether his daughter belongs to Edward, like everything else in his life, of course Edward is aghast and denies it. But that's when the police arrive, a voice on a megaphone telling Mickey they've got trained marksmen aiming at him and to put the gun down before they have to use them. Mickey brokenly tells Edward that he came there to shoot him but he can't; he doesn't know if the gun is even loaded.

But that's when Mrs. Johnstone comes in (Mickey picked up the gun from her house), pleading for him to please not shoot Edward, because he's his brother. She explains the whole thing, and why she had to give one of them away. And Edward actually smiles, but Mickey, hysterical, asks why she didn't give him away, because (he waves the gun towards Edward) he could've been him. ...And that's when the gun goes off. Edward dies instantly, and the police react immediately to shoot Mickey down as well. Ultimately they did both die as a result of learning they were brothers. The narrator, a bit on the nose, asks if the cause of this was the superstition, or the British class system.

Really it's both, a combination of curious coincidences that seem suspiciously like a kind of destiny with the cruel system of injustices that slowly breaks one brother and grinds him into the dust. It wouldn't have happened if not for both mothers' misguided efforts to protect their children, either. It's a very fairy tale sort of story, hinging on several contrived happenstances, but the way it's presented makes it work - that inevitable looming destiny is a tangible presence in the play in the form of the narrator and his songs, who in turn also represents the anxieties of the two mothers about the deal that they made - the devil inside of them, if you will.

I've got some niggles with the show. Mostly, the second half of Act II feels a little rushed through. In the blink of an eye (literally maybe like ten minutes), Mickey loses his job, he and Edward have their falling-out, Mickey takes part in a robbery and goes to prison, spends a few years there, becomes dependent on antidepressants, and generally loses his will to live. Because Mickey's descent into disillusionment, bitterness, desperation and depression is pretty much the most important event of the story, and definitely the most important in Act II, I think the musical could have spent a little more time on it, and I definitely think it could've been expanded at the expense of some of the earlier bits. (One of the longest songs in the musical, at about four and a half minutes, is "Bright New Day", about the Johnstones being rehomed, and it's also definitively the least interesting one; to be honest I think that entire song could probably be cut to absolutely no ill effect for the story, since the sole point that it makes, about how things are looking up for the family when they move, is about to be made again and more illustratively in "Marilyn Monroe 2".) Sean Jones totally sold it, though, so I’m not complaining too much.

Also, Mrs. Lyons disappears from the plot entirely between her trying to murder Mrs. Johnstone and telling Mickey about seeing Edward and Linda together, kicking off the entire final chain of events. This is both disappointing - this is exactly when her delusional paranoia has reached its furthest point! Why wouldn't you show more of her! - and leaves the setup for the latter event a bit lacking. It's not at all obvious exactly what would drive her to tell Mickey about the affair. Mulling it over afterwards you can work out that ultimately the point here for her has to be to try to drive Mickey and Linda away from Edward by making Mickey hate him, but we get no insight into her emotional process, whether she's been doing better or worse since the whole trying to murder Mrs. Johnstone incident, or exactly what she was thinking there.

It's also, hmm, a little Problematic(tm) in places. Kids playing cowboys and indians, okay, that's kind of awkwardly racist to a modern progressive audience but these are kids in the 60s, fair enough. The narrator's interlude about "gypsies in the woods going to take your baby away" is, sure, a representation of the superstitious and prejudiced thoughts of Mrs. Lyons, but still, yikes, and it’s a bit uncomfortable that it's ultimately being put in the mouth of the seemingly impartial narrator rather than the prejudiced character herself. (Suggestion: please just make it fairies or elves, guys.) And then there's the whole bit with Linda explaining to Mickey that he doesn't need any pills, that she gets depressed sometimes and she doesn't need them! Which I suppose we can charitably take to be Linda's in-character ignorance about mental illness, and after Mickey does get off the pills he just becomes even more desperate and miserable and nearly shoots someone, so the narrative doesn't exactly validate her as it plays out, but it still feels distinctly like the show expects us to agree with Linda there. All of this is probably because it's written in the eighties, and I'm not going to rag on it too much as a child of its time, but it did bother me a bit.

(Also, fridge logic: why is the gun still hidden where Sammy put it after the robbery? Given Mickey knew where it was hidden, if the police successfully found out he was an accomplice to the murder I can't imagine what Mickey could have gained by keeping quiet about it, and clearly it’s important evidence that they’d want to get their hands on, right?)

But overall, it was a good and I loved it a lot. The soundtrack isn't one of my favorites on the whole, but I really enjoy the heavy use of repeated themes - my favorite songs are the narrator's various brief reprises of "Shoes Upon the Table" containing the "devil's got your number" echo, particularly "Madman". (Also, I wish they'd publish a cast album with the cast and arrangements that we saw, that isn't missing a bunch of songs.) If I ever get a chance to see it again, I will.