"Bare". Keble O'Reilly

Bare – as its title suggests – is an emotionally revealing experience. Stripped bare of irony, self-mockery or even sub-plots, its strength rests in its honesty. It’s a coming-of-age rock musical about being gay in a Catholic boarding school in the USA, and it sets the central characters, Jason and Peter, against a backdrop of intolerant institutions – Church, school, family – with a clarion call to be yourself and not hide behind masks of conformity.

That all sounds a bit Route One for an Oxford audience, and maybe it is. Bare feels like an uncomplicated, American-style, issue-led sequence of torch-songs aimed at inspiring teenagers to be true to their own identities. Jaqueline Wilson meets High School Musical.

For this particular old cynic, that runs the risk of being just too saccharine. And for the first half it was.

But then, as the second half took hold, it finally started to chip away at the tongue in my cheek, and by the end it had worn through my battered, emotionless defences. The tears broke through and rolled down my cheeks, and I went all pink. Like watching Mamma Mia for the first time, I was won over by the sheer sincerity and dedication of the whole endeavour.

And what dedication! The crew alone on this show totalled 37 people, and the cast was another 20. That’s not even counting the musicians. It’s fair to say that every one of them put their heart and soul into their work, and it showed. None of them have had formal training (if they had they’d be at theatre schools, not Oxford colleges), and yet their dancing was phenomenal: stylish, shapely, and perfectly choreographed. Their singing was (with minor occasional dips) exceptional, and they were rehearsed to the point where every one of them was pose-perfect at every single moment. My evil little critic’s eyes were scanning the back row of the ensemble looking for slackers, and none were to be found. Perhaps this did savour slightly of a well-drilled youth theatre production, but to be honest, that’s what the material calls for.

The plot hangs loosely on a school production of Romeo and Juliet, and the action amongst the student protagonists mirrors the events in Shakespeare’s play. Maybe that’s another reason why it gets better in the second half: Romeo and Juliet famously starts like a comedy but ends as a tragedy; Bare is much more comfortable with tragedy than comedy. In fact, one of the key elements of Shakespeare’s original is all the servants who constantly mock the behaviour of the main characters. That’s noticeably missing from Bare, and it would have benefitted from a few undercutting laughs.

Undoubtedly the high point of the evening is a heart-rending phone call between Peter and his mother, in which he tries to tell her that he’s gay, and she won’t let him get the words out. The singing performances by Gianni Tam Macmillan and Eleanor Dunlop in that scene were so brilliant, and the simple staging so effective, that I briefly forgot where I was, and at the end of the song my partner and I instantly turned to each other and mouthed, ‘That was INCREDIBLE.’

Given the awe-inspiring degree of preparation that has gone into this production, the one area that was noticeable by its absence was set design. The cast make effective use of an impressively versatile staircase on wheels, but there could have been so much more, helping to flesh out the action and provide backdrops to the dances. Even simply using the theatre’s resident white backdrop to project images would have been great*. Set design doesn’t feature in many Oxford productions, and I do wonder if there is a well of talent at the Ruskin just waiting to be tapped. The original US production of Bare was enhanced by live video feeds projected from the cast members' phones. That must have been amazing, and fitting the theme of social inclusion. 

Another simple improvement would be a quick tinker with sound levels. The band frequently drowned out the singing at this performance, meaning a certain amount of lyrical detail was lost. 

I freely admit that I’ve never seen myself as the ideal audience for an American teen musical – even one that explores issues outside the conventional, heteronormative world of Broadway blockbusters. Maybe I’m going soft, or maybe the ridiculous levels of talent on display in this show are just an enormous treat to witness. But I’m ready to bare all myself and admit: I loved it.

* I have since been informed by the producer that projections were in fact planned but couldn't be programmed in time. Kudos for the effort!