Poor Boy

Tonight I met up with Tash and her roommate Jennifer at the new Melbourne Theatre Company Sumner Theatre for the play Poor Boy starring Guy Pearce. It was written by Matt Cameron and incorporates the music of Tim Finn throughout. The plot of the play is as follows:

Jeremy Glass is an untroubled little boy until his seventh birthday, when he suddenly announces that he is really a grown man called Danny, who died some years before. How can his parents indulge his conviction that he must find his real family? And how can his eerie insistence on his true identity not resurrect painful memories for Danny’s widow?

The new theatre is gorgeous and we had excellent seats in the second row to the right of the stage. The plot of the story took a bit of time to understand, but it ended up making sense by the end. The actors were all great and made the switches between dialogue and song easily. They had a live band hidden in the set on the stage and it was good to hear such a wide variety of Tim's songs used, especially Split Enz's "Walking Through The Ruins." Our other excitement of the night was spotting Ashley Zukerman from the tv show Rush in the audience. Poor Boy is finishing up its run in Melbourne this week and then heads up to Sydney later in the year.