Luke (Jake Winn) and his kidnapper Michael (Jeffry Denman). Photo: Margot Schulman.
By DCist Contributor Landon Randolph
Kid Victory, a new musical making its premiere at Signature Theatre, is about a boy struggling to readjust to normal life after spending the greater part of a year chained in the basement of a child predator. As you might imagine, it’s a bit more intense than your average happy-go-lucky musical; the show is an unflinching (though, yes, musical) look at a tragic loss of innocence.
Luke, the boy in question, is played by Jake Winn with a caginess that speaks to the character’s recent trauma. He is visibly uneasy around just about everyone, looking like he wants nothing more than to bolt from the room. His anxiety is infectious; as he flinches away from his well-meaning but overbearing friends and family, the audience is forcefully reminded that the supposed comforting familiarity of home no longer exists for him. Declining to return to school or to speak to his old friends, Luke instead gets a job at a garden shop run by Emily (Sarah Litsinger), an offbeat woman with tattoos and blonde dreadlocks. He struggles to make sense of the world around him, while the world struggles to find the child lost in the broken boy that came back to it; a struggle compounded by the fact that Luke’s new hangout choice doesn’t exactly align with his mother’s more conservative religious worldview. As he spends more and more time in the shop, actively avoiding interaction with anyone that he knew before his abduction, his family and friends grow increasingly concerned that he’s not recovering in quite the way they would like.
John Kander’s and Greg Pierce’s story is a wrenchingly sad one, somewhat incongruously so. It takes place immediately after the cameras have left the scene of what must’ve been the feel good local news item of the year. The musical subtly and quietly introduces a sense of unease into the moments after the immediate joy of a safe homecoming has started to fade. This is due in large part to Kander’s score, which is brilliantly eerie despite sounding like a traditional big-budget broadway musical; the brassy, sleek numbers juxtapose jarringly and uneasily with the play’s laser beam thematic focus on the quietly despairing Luke. It underscores the sense of oppression Luke feels as he navigates a newly unfamiliar home. It’s possible to watch the entire show without realizing that if Luke sings at all, it’s no more than one or two lines as part of an ensemble.
The hushed adversity of Luke’s day-to-day life is punctuated by his flashbacks to his erstwhile kidnapper Michael (Jeffry Denman), whose magnetism and energy—and a mutual fascination with sailboats—draws Luke to him. He has a confident, masculine, sinister air; he seems like a sociopath that reads too much Hemingway. His abuse of Luke is punctuated with insidious parables disguised as history lessons—he memorably tells Luke that through “to the west of pain is a paradise,” singing about the heroic struggles of Viking colonizers of Vinland. He mixes moments of extreme cruelty with winning charm—the show reserves it’s showstopper love ballad for him to sing. Denman’s performance is such that you feel the pull that must have exerted itself so strongly on Luke yourself, and then recoil in revulsion as you remember what this man is actually singing about.
Kid Victory is one of the more challenging things onstage in the area at the moment, and it might be tempting to get your kidnapping fix from The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt instead. But making the effort to see Kid is worth it. There are few shows that could deal with the aftershocks of kidnapping and abuse in the fearless, nuanced and tender way that this musical manages to do with aplomb.
Kid Victory plays at Signature Theatre through March 22. Tickets, $37-92, are available here.
