WISH-LIST WEDNESDAY: In The Green

PREMIERED: 2019 (Claire Tow Theater, New York)

MUSIC/LYRICS/BOOK: Grace McLean

As we enter the spring season, and plant life begins to reinvigorate, how about a one-act musical from broadway favourite Grace McLean to get you feeling the warmth. Best known for her roles in musicals "Suffs", "Alice By Heart" and "Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812", McLean is also a highly accomplished writer and composer, and this musical tribute to saint Hildegard von Bingen truly put her on the map as a multi-talented force to be reckoned with. First premiering in 2019, "In The Green" was McLean's professional writing debut, during which she also played the role if Jutta; the show won her a Richard Rodgers Award, as well as two nominations at the Lucille Lortel awards, winning for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Musical.

The musical is a one act, one hour long ode to the renowned medieval scientist, composer and mystic, and mainly focuses on the thirty year stretch she spent behind bars, sharing a cell with her mentor, the anchoress Jutta von Sponheim. McLean's score is an eclectic blend of genres, fusing together 12th-century gregorian chant, female Bulgarian choruses, and von Bingen's own music and lyrics with influences of jazz, indie rock and hip-hop, also including vocal techniques first pioneered by Meredith Monk and Yoko Ono.

New York critics were very much unanimous in their praise of the show's impressive, highly sophisticated score, as well as its various visual elements, including the use of a dirt floor, also used in shows like "The Outsiders". After a well received and successful run off-broadway, who knows where this avant-garde will end up, and there is certainly no shortage of spaces in London where it could have the opportunity to grow and thrive into a thing of verdant beauty and spectacle.