Naaman’s score, co-composed with Dana Al Fardan, is best when it’s unabashedly romantic and there’s a particularly handsome swell to the young love song, Here in This Garden. But there’s not a huge amount of variety to the music and surprisingly little of the unique sounds or rhythms of the Middle East.
Read more
Lagan’s direction and indeed Erika Gundusen’s tight musical direction tries hard to counter the awkward pacing of the story and, to an extent, it works. However, Broken Wings is a promising musical that seems to still be in the fixing stage rather than the finished product.
Read more
What emerges is a musical that, in its desire to stay true to its source material's themes and honour Gibran's enlightened approach to women's agency in a patriarchal world, has lost too much of the impetus, the light and shade, that a show with ambitions like this one requires.
Read more
The singing is sometimes glorious...The pointlessly revolving stage, however, only emphasises the basic problem: this circuitous tale doesn’t really go anywhere.
Read more
Despite being dramatically undernourished as a piece of theatre, the unique combination of bombast and delicacy in the music lingers long in the heart and mind afterwards. I suspect it'll divide people, but that its most staunch supporters will be vociferous.
Read more