Fifteen-year-old Malia wants to be an author, and she is writing a story about a bird with broken wings who longs to get to the top of a mountain and to fly. However, just when Malia goes off to writers' camp to hone her craft, she learns that her mother has stage four cancer and will soon die. The first act of Fly More Than You Fall deals with the challenges faced by a teenager who is trying to cope with a family crisis while she also seeks to live a normal adolescent life. The second act explores how Malia deals with her grief and loss after her mother's death. The relationship with her father becomes tense, and her friends' conventional sympathy and expectation that one simply finds the resources to survive a parent's loss do not recognise her real needs. There is a fine line between creating emotional engagement and emotional manipulation, and it sometimes seems as if this show uncomfortably crosses it. Like Malia herself, it can feel as if the audience is being pressurised, rather than being allowed to respond personally to the situation that is being depicted. Both Robyn Rose-Li as Malia and Keala Settle as her mother bring powerful voices to their roles, and Settle's absence from the second act leaves a real void. Stewart J. Charlesworth's set which is made up of pages from a writer's notebook which suggest wings neatly takes advantage of the limited space available and reinforces the relation between Malia's story and her life experience, but Heather Douglas' choreography often seems generic and unconnected to either the characters or plot. Malia's fable about the bird, Willow, is intended as a young adult novel, and the simplicity and transparency of Fly More Than You Fall, with its heavy-handed parallelism, make the show seem like it could be a musical version of that genre.
Rated: ★★★
Reviewed by J.C.
Photo by Craig Fuller
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