This is a narrated, dramatized history-biography, with some songs and dances, and recitations of Service’s popular poems. So we might as well call Wanderlust a musical.
To be fair to those who really like Robert Service’s poetry, and even those who think it important, I should note that Panych and Norman have created a pleasant little drama with some appealing music, some of it an accurate account of Service’s life, and got it staged with winning skill by Stratford’s extraordinarily gifted performers and designers.
I’ve always liked Service’s intentionally funny poems, like “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” and since this Stratford season also features a musical celebrating the poetry of Charles M. Schultz’s “Peanuts,” I can’t object to a world premiere of a musical celebrating Service’s life and work. It’s more authentically Canadian.
Of course, Service spent a lot of his life as a very wealthy dilettante in France. Wanderlust makes it clear that he wrote about the Yukon from afar, later lived there as a dandy for only eight years, and mostly worked in banks in Canada, where he was wholly unfamiliar with the gaudy adventures he wrote about. That colorless reality is recreated in this musical with such artistic consistency that I thought the introduction of a primary color ontage might have caused panic, if not seizures. But it is a special inside view that has its champions. The reality – that Service was a shrewd self-promoter who wrote and sold more poetry than any of his more seriously regarded contemporaries – has little to do with this show’s point of view.
Tom Rooney, an extraordinarily versatile and affecting actor, makes this Walter Mitty version of Robert Service as appealing as he can. Dan Chameroy plays his understandably more successful rival; Randy Hughson is dryly funny as his wry boss; and Lucy Peacock is delightful as always playing Mrs. Munsch. I really liked Alan Brodie’s imaginative lighting. But I have to confess to a minority reaction to writer/director Morris Panych’s work, which strikes me here as elsewhere to be unusually effortful.
