Whether in casual dinner conversation or at one’s wit’s end, there come moments in life where we, as a society, ponder on a million-dollar question:
“What would I do with a million dollars?”
If it landed on your doorstep or fell from the sky, what would you do with it? How would you feel about it?
Playwright Bob Martin and musical composer Adam Guettel demand that we honestly sit with those questions. Based on the novel and film by Frank Cottrell Boyce, Millions tells the story of family, finances, and fate when 8-year-old Damian and his older brother Anthony shockingly uncover what seems to be “a gazillion” dollars after their mother passes away. From piercing ballads of grief to uplifting motifs of the perseverance it births, Adam Guettel demonstrates a relentless dedication to raw honesty.
In a 2001 interview for an autobiography about his grandfather, Richard Rodgers, Guettel expressed how significant composition is to carrying an emotional message by saying, “Music is coming at us in waves that we cannot quantify or parse out or understand or relegate to some previous experience. It's new. It’s a universal and always fresh language.” Over two decades later, this sentiment beautifully bleeds through the score of Millions, song after song. Guettel's colorful composition takes the listeners on an honest journey through the minds and hearts of Damian, Anthony, and their father Ron; he invites the audience to put themselves in the shoes of the Monarch Mesa Residents to really get a feel for this truth.
“Music is coming at us in waves that we cannot quantify or parse out or understand or relegate to some previous experience. It's new. It’s a universal and always fresh language.”
The show opens on a heartfelt up-tempo overture that features operatic vocal scales. As he played a lot with contrast, this syncopation in the song paints the picture of what an average morning trying to get two young boys ready for school looks like – uniquely organized chaos. The underscoring beat itself even resembles a human heartbeat, rising and falling in intensity with every melodic shift. This heartbeat pumping blood through the body of the show belongs to Ron, who is constantly flipping the double-sided coin of grieving your wife while learning how to raise your children alone. In his earnest solo, “Feel For This,” the tense staccato phrases paired with the intentionally strained belts display how tightly he contained his grief – or tried to.
In Damian and Anthony’s grief, however, they each explore their own varying relationships with faith and nearly opposing views on whether a duffel bag full of mysterious money is truly a gift or a curse. Nevertheless, they manage to harmonize – both literally and figuratively – and agree on the only sentiment they can: “Our Mom Is Dead.” The title’s candor is as purposeful as the coy and jazzy tone the children take on to justify using their grief as “get out of jail free” cards. Guettel manages to always find places to breathe laughter into the thread of the story, as the dichotomy of life and death itself create an absurd comedic edge.
Guettel beckons authenticity of the world of the show and the audience alike, wielding each character’s vulnerability as they are met with that million-dollar question. What would I do with a million dollars? Do I deserve such a blessing? Is this blessing a curse? The music of Millions encourages us to embrace the dichotomy of faith and logic-the organized chaos of life. In that loving embrace, each jagged edge and rounded corner of the Cunninghams’ story – and all just like it – are honored.
Find more information about Millions here.
