U.ME: The Musical – Part Two: Life and love after the pandemic

It’s 2021. The pandemic is at the height of its terror and two young people locked down on opposite sides of the world, Rose and Ryo, meet for the first time online. A virtual romance blossoms, and at last the two are due to meet in person – in reality. Full of yearning, Ryo flies from Tokyo to London.

Part One of the strikingly innovative radio creation U.Me: The Musical aired to broad acclaim on the BBC World Service in May 2021. In its wake it won many prizes and so its creators – who might perhaps be likened to the daring independent filmmakers the Coen Brothers in the way they work on everything together – have decided to continue its story with a second instalment set to launch in February.

Martin Sarreal returns to the role of Ryo for the upcoming Part Two ©Steve Levine

In this new chapter of the story, also narrated by actor Stephen Fry, the world has managed to survive the pandemic, and life goes on – except that all around the globe many people are feeling that post-pandemic life just isn’t a straightforward continuation at all: we have all been traumatised in an unprecedented way. A complex and demanding subject for any genre of artistic creation, and especially so for a musical – but then U.Me: The Musical is not a musical in the conventional sense, aside from its musical and theatrical ‘ambience’. This is a strongly emotional and dramatic invention realistically portraying human reactions in the changed world of our time via a special medium – radio musical theatre – that can be experienced anywhere and everywhere on this planet. Its definition as a musical resides in its realms of ‘popular’ sounding songs and colloquial dialogue – but in its new second instalment its expressive core is in many ways closer to dramatic opera. In this sense it could remind one of how in West Side Story Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, and Stephen Sondheim shattered perceived conceptual barriers between classical music, jazz, popular song, and dance and created a theatrical experience that had immediate and immense appeal to followers and lovers of all those art forms.

Part one of U.Me: The Musical, which I covered in Classical Music at the time of its premiere, had been born in the most exceptionally challenging circumstances, as its conceiver, initiator and dramaturgic creator Simon Pitts recalls: ‘At some point in December 2020, I was washing up after lunch, and feeling very depressed during that lockdown that I couldn’t go out to see theatre, opera, musicals, all the kinds of events I love. It came to me that a good way round this interruption was to create some new theatre about this moment we were all experiencing and to make this piece in the genre of a musical, which would be the strongest way that people around the world who love theatre could experience together what we were all being denied.

‘For this I had to find a brilliant composer – someone with creative imagination of an unusual kind who could musically bring a story to life: emotionally, dramatically, and atmospherically. That was such a challenge that it would make or break the entire initiative. I was looking for someone as widely interested in music as I am: with knowledge of opera and classical music as well as Country, Dance, Disco, hip hop, jazz and contemporary composition. Someone who could make a contemporary musical feel like a recognisable – albeit heightened – version of audiences’ own lives.

‘Enter Theo Jamieson – and in fulfilling all those exigencies more excitingly than I had dared dream, he also crucially was able to develop ideas together with rare pragmatism and sensitivity. And so we formed a duo collaborating on a story with music: a musical telling a there-and-then story of peoples’ lives in lockdown, with music that would somehow capture the emotional experience of this extraordinary time. Our story of Rose and Ryo was of young office staff connecting from thousands of miles away, of how lives were stopped, how they craved real human touch, and romance, how they yearned for life. Theo’s triumph was to express so evocatively and so truthfully in music what words, no matter how strong, can only convey to a relatively limited degree on their own. We then found the most tremendously talented performers for all the roles: Anoushka Lucas and Martin Sarreal as Rose and Ryo and other superb artists for additional characters. After all that, in almost unimaginably stretching circumstances music producer Steve Levine ingeniously mixed together the performances of the soloists, a band, and the magnificent BBC Philharmonic Orchestra whose every member had been recorded separately in their homes under lockdown – and our Musical was born.’

It was, as Simon said in 2021, a tale, both in the musical’s storyline and in its actual production, of people shut away in the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic being brought together again by music and art. And it ended on a cliff-hanger: ‘Our character Ryo decided he would fly all the way over from Japan to meet Rose – at last they would connect in reality: see each other “live”, actually meet and be physically close. That’s how we concluded the musical back in 2021 – and in due course, after its successful reception, I realised there was so much more to explore about how we were all getting over, or at least trying to get over, this collective pandemic trauma. Friends of mine were making changes as a response: some were leaving jobs or homes, some were facing up to deep personal obstacles. And I wanted to explore how our characters were changed by the period. How had they suffered? To what extent were they adapting or succeeding in healing and remaking themselves “post-lockdowns”.’

And for Part Two of the musical, this led Simon and Theo again to explore an uneasiness that seems to have pervaded a lot of peoples’ lives since the world has returned to normality (if only in name). The story takes a surprising and sometimes disconcerting turn with Rose finding herself feeling isolated and at odds with what her environment seems to expect of her: she is oppressed with anxieties and conflicts – and the longed-for fulfilment of romance never blossoms. She symbolises something deep inside that many of the more sensitive people of this world have been experiencing post-pandemic, and Theo has composed an unexpected and strikingly inventive musical tapestry embodying this disquiet. You feel it right at the very start of Part Two as the scene opens with a strange repeated sound like a clock ticking relentlessly – and that recurs many times through this second instalment like a leitmotif.

‘The Pandemic soft-ended,’ Theo comments, ‘and to all intents and purposes people started going back to work and re-entering something that appeared close to their normal lives – but I knew many people who were feeling what I was: that the perspective on our lives had completely shifted. Ways you behaved out of habit, and which you hadn’t given any thought to, you were now questioning. Things that had held you together were coming loose. What you had thought were off limits – questions of who and what you thought you were in the world: suddenly they were on the table, and you were doubting them. At the same time, this gave me the opportunity to examine and consider elements of my life that had not been making me happy, but which I had passed over, and I think a lot of people were going through that process. So we were – and have been – changing, making decisions, or at least seeking to make them, about who we are and how we live our lives. That has been a painful period, but an important one, and Rose’s emotions and consequent reactions in this situation are central to Part Two of the musical.’

Cat Simmons takes on the role of Anya for the second instalment of U.Me Musical ©Steve Levine

Simon adds: ‘Taken together, Parts One and Two address our era’s great disturbance. And in Part Two Rose is given the cruel chance that the pandemic offered many: to face up to herself and to try to learn who she really is. This story, in which our characters find and redefine themselves, is also a story of eternities and cycles: of mothers and daughters, and of details, of days, nights and the power of the elemental. Rose really does goes through tough experiences – and Anoushka gives a tour-de-force performance. Her part is very demanding because Theo has written exceptionally wide-ranging songs which express searing emotional challenges.’

Theo’s success in Part Two is the realisation of the delicate and fundamental tightrope between fear and discovery in a subtle musical blend of dramatic emotional colour and lyrical vocal extroversion – so that although the listener feels the broad-ranging stylistic volatility, yet this does sound unmistakably like a Musical. Even then, it features vocal writing that oscillates from post-hip-hop patter to sustained bel canto lines, via Ades-reminiscent mad scenes, and over a backing that combines extended harmonies of Wagner and Britten with J-Dilla breakbeats, and rhythm section writing that wouldn't be out of place on a Dirty Projectors record. It’s a very particularly original musical, with operatic overtones and a rare, formidably demanding trial of versatility for the artist taking the part of Rose, to whom the brilliant award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and composer Anoushka Lucas feels personally very close, as she tells us.

‘I feel incredibly close to Rose, but this is a testament to the way both the script and the music capture her vulnerabilities. I think what I have discovered in my own life is that the sense of being an outsider that comes over Rose actually exists in everyone, but to a considerably greater or lesser extent in different people, and this is what affects how much or how little they really feel aware of it. I think Rose’s interiority is so well rendered in this second part of the musical, and it’s altogether very compelling the way Part Two follows Part One. A friend of mine who lives in the Czech Republic has listened to Part One of U.Me over and over again, and it’s her favourite musical. We were chatting about Part Two coming up and she said “What happened to Rose and Ryo?” She was dismayed when I said, “That’s not what it’s about.” “What do you mean?!” she queried. “Well, it’s partly about that” I said, “but it's really actually about all the other relationships in Rose’s life and Rose as a person emerging from the Pandemic. It’s about all the other strands that make Rose a human being and how she is having to renegotiate them in order to function in a post-Pandemic world.” I enormously enjoyed playing Rose even more in Part Two – even though her panic attack was a nightmare to sing!”’

There’s a car crash too – and a lot of emotional tension. But if you listen to U.Me: The Musical – Part Two, also available as a podcast series, and you also are able to watch the accompanying new vividly engrossing animations by Dan Masterson, you will surely come away at the end feeling comforted. It is a compassionate and forgiving experience, and like the very finest in art, it gives us strength and courage through understanding.