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nytheatre.com review by Ross Peabody
Byuioo, a strong new play by Nate Weida, is a gibberish musical, performed entirely in a gibberish language akin to English, via Portuguese, via your one-year-old niece. This play confuses me a bit, but not for the obvious reasons. Indeed, the language barrier is far from an impediment to the understanding of the play. It is a simple story, simply told. It is never difficult to follow, which is a tribute to everyone involved in the show.I should back up here. Byiuoo (bee-you-you) means "beauty" in the language of the play. The story itself is a fable. Based on Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, it is the story of Mogo, whose loving mother dies in childbirth and is left with a hateful father. He is very quickly spirited off to be put in the charge of Kip, the narrator, and his partner, Raksha. They are the head of the pack of monkeys and other animals (Baloo, Basheera, Akela, Rikki Tikki Tavi, etc.), and also a group of street urchins who simultaneously act out the roles of the animals, and tell the story of Mogo, or really, of Byuioo. Mogo is raised lovingly by this happy family (and worshipped, in a way, for his beauty and purity of soul) until he is kidnapped by the circus (apparently to be tormented and to do interpretive dances for money), freed by Baloo and Bashira, and kidnapped again at gunpoint. The story itself is a lament to what the world can do to a pure soul and a paean to the power inherent in that purity to affect those that it comes in contact with.Despite the clarity of tale, and the surprising clarity of the language, I still don't know what this ambitious show is. I do know that this is a collaboration by a phenomenally talented 24-person cast, crew, and band (I must, though, single out Zachary Mordechai as the Tom Waits- and Dizzy Gillespie-infused Akela, who shines bright in a sea of bright stars). The tribal, funky, percussive, and essentially easy-going music is finely crafted by Weida and his band. The sets, costumes, and lights by Steven T. Royal, Jr. infuse the play with a vivid life, and David Jefferson Sorrell's direction (he also plays the evil Khan) is generally flawless and taut with a very professional and satisfying sheen.It is this very commercially professional sheen that leaves me with something of a quandary. This play is a fable about the perfection of beauty and love, and the experience of losing that and learning from it. It has all the makings of a theatrical feast of emotional catharsis. However, we never experience the highs that are described to us that can be found in purity, nor do we ever experience the terror of that purity being ripped away. This play is so by-the-book well-made that it has abandoned a sense of beauty for a palatable accessibility. It is very good, but it's not compelling.The choice of gibberish as the native language of the piece is particularly curious. This choice, in this play, leaves me with the belief that Byuioo can only be one of two things: either a fantastic audience-pleasing play that is hindered by misplaced '60s avant-gardist sensibilities, or, more likely, a stunningly executed and wonderfully produced acting class workshop that ultimately uses gibberish to show off the great talents of the cast at illustrating big ideas through other-verbal performance tools instead of using it to actually examine those ideas.Copyright © 2013 The New York Theatre Experience, Inc. All rights reserved.
