Sometimes it's hard to know the audience's role at an education project performance. Is it to be drawn in to what's happening on stage, or simply to witness that homework has been well done?
Darwin's Dream, premiered in the town of the naturalist's birth by a cast including 120 local school children and three professional singers, is a case in point. It's due at London's Albert Hall next month, a venue several evolutionary steps away from Shrewsbury's cosy Music Hall. Perhaps there, director Philippe Cherbonnier will allow his cast to vent a bit more energy.
The story may not be theatrical, but it does outline a useful classroom project on evolution and thus engenders a sigh of relief that schools aren't staging Creationism - The Musical just yet.
Some teenagers meet the young Darwin (Robert Rice), exploring in the rainforest; he explains his wacky ideas about giant tortoises, and sends them to find what happens next. They encounter jovial palaeontologist Joe, and DNA expert Dr Evelyn, a relation of Mozart's Queen of the Night, perched above a half-moon screen thronging with double helixes. They return to reassure the now aged Darwin that he was right all along.
Plenty of opportunity, then, for the younger children to raid the percussion cupboard to conjure up rainforest drips, turtle croaks and fossil scrapes accompanying atmospheric projections of Ben Osborne's wildlife shots. The hard working Music Service Shropshire Girls' Choir impressed as Darwin's envoys, no more so than when imitating soprano Catherine May in Dr Evelyn's coloratura.
Not all of what they were learning came across to us, however, and even though Andy Morton's words were clear, I'm not sure I'm any the wiser about fossil creation following Joe's explanation. At least he tried to liven up the stage. Graham Treacher's score, played by the Fibonacci Sequence under Patrick Bailey, offered some attractive choruses, but if only there had been something to tempt the obediently promenading children to let their hair down.
· At the Royal Albert Hall, London SW7, on March 20. Box office: 020 7589 8212.
