Bliss ⭐

“Four sisters escape their tower and collide with the outside world. Where fairy godfathers rule and happy endings come at a cost.”

There is a certain irony in calling a musical Bliss when, for much of its 80-minute running time, I was desperately searching for mine. On paper, this should be a major Fringe event. A large-scale new musical, seventeen West End performers, Olivier Award-winning creatives and producers behind Cabaret and The Great Gatsby, and my personal favourite, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The production certainly looks the part. Unfortunately, somewhere underneath all that money, ambition and fairy-dust, the actual musical gets rather lost.

Direction by Sheryl Kaller is one of the production's stronger elements. There are some effective moments of staging, and she generally knows how to move the story forward. The problem is that the production itself is inconsistent, with certain moments that feel underdeveloped or don't make much sense within the established world. There is ambition here, although ambition without clarity can become clutter.

Choreography by Josh Prince was, unfortunately, one of my biggest frustrations. At times, the choreography is so distracting that it pulls focus away from the principal characters and the story. Rather than improving the musical numbers, some sequences feel corny and overly staged, making it difficult to understand why the movement is there beyond filling the space.

Lighting by Jai Morjaria is very fun and technically impressive. There are some lovely states, and the lighting certainly contributes to the scenic spectacle. The LED tubes look cheap and create a confusing backdrop to the story. But while the swirly tubes look good, I struggled to understand exactly what they were communicating. They feel like a random choice rather than a fully integrated part of the storytelling. There is a difference between something looking impressive and something having a clear theatrical purpose.

Tony Gayle's sound was far too loud for me. There were occasions where it seemed as if my ears were going to explode, and more importantly, the volume occasionally meant that I missed words in the songs. In a musical, the lyrics matter. If I can't hear them, that's a problem. And it just sounded awful and muddy, and there seemed to be no delay on any of the speakers around the venue, which, if true, is just awful.

Set by Jason Ardizzone-West is good and, importantly, doesn't feel like a typical Fringe set. The production has clearly received significant investment, and it looks impressive. The design gives the show a sense of scale that is unusual for Edinburgh. There are, however, moments where that scale becomes slightly cheap-looking or excessively corny. The production sometimes seems to try so hard to convince us it is a big musical that it forgets big doesn't automatically mean better.

Paloma Young's costume design is extensive, and there are certainly plenty of good-looking costumes. But I couldn't help wondering whether every single costume change was necessary. The sheer quantity occasionally feels like the production is showing us how much it has rather than asking what each costume contributes to the story. And some of the colour palettes seem all over the place.

The book by Emma Lively and Tyler Beattie is where the production really starts to fall apart for me. The central problem is that it never seems entirely sure what message it wants to communicate. It tries to tackle perfection, sisterhood, identity, fairy-tale expectations, freedom, friendship, relationships, and the price of happiness. And rather than letting any one of these ideas develop properly, it tries to cram them all into 80 minutes.

At times, the writing leans so heavily into nonsense that the story loses any sense of emotional grounding. Other scenes feel unnecessary and, frankly, boring. The pacing is particularly inconsistent: at times the show crawls along, only to suddenly accelerate through plot developments that desperately needed more time. It also frequently feels far too childish for the themes it is attempting to explore. There is nothing wrong with creating a family musical; in fact, there are some brilliant ones, but Bliss occasionally seems written for toddlers while trying to communicate surprisingly sophisticated ideas. Those two things can coexist. Here, they don't always.

The music and lyrics by Emma Lively and Tyler Beattie suffer from many of the same problems. There isn't a song that has stayed with me, and some of the lyrics are, frankly, a choice. The bigger issue is that the score sounds as though several different musical theatre genres are competing for the same soundtrack. Pop-rock, traditional musical theatre, comedy numbers and more contemporary vocal writing all appear, but they don't always feel like they belong to the same musical. There are some interesting vocal ideas, but interesting doesn't necessarily mean effective. I wanted the score to have a stronger identity of its own.

The performances from the seventeen-strong company are generally okay, but the ensemble's size becomes part of the problem. A significant portion of the ensemble could have been cut without the production losing anything substantial. Too many characters feel like cardboard cut-outs rather than fully developed people, which makes it hard to care about them. The performances need more levels. More emotional variation. More specificity. There is a lot of energy, but energy isn't the same as character.

The highlight for me was Tom Bennett as Glimmermore, who is brilliantly funny and manages to create one of the show's more rounded characters. He understands exactly what sort of ridiculousness the role requires while still giving the character enough personality to make him genuinely entertaining. That performance gave me a glimpse of what Bliss could have been if more of its characters had been given the same attention.

There is no denying that Bliss is ambitious. It is colourful, expensive-looking and packed with performers who clearly have considerable talent. But a musical cannot survive on production values alone. There are good ideas here, but for a show about running from a tower and discovering the outside world, Bliss ironically feels trapped inside its own excess (definitely not original), and there are just some pieces of theatre that just shouldn’t be made.

Bliss plays at the Pleasance Courtyard in The Grand from 5–31 August at 1:00 pm and has a run time of approximately 80 minutes with no interval. Book tickets for Bliss