Flying Penguin Productions. Goodwood Theatre and Studios. 30 Oct 2025
American Song was written nine years ago. Its relevance remains as powerful now as then.
Justice. Peace. The ‘on track’ good life. The American Dream complete.
Andy (Renato Musolino) presents to us, an audience in the round, as a man halfway between sure and deeply unsure about these things.
There’s a foreboding sadness as he tells his life’s tale while building a rock wall, stone by stone. Something in life went wrong. Something we’re not up to speed with. Yet.
As Andy outlines his sense of moments of life significance; the wonderful wife, the career, the wonderful son, he’s also questioning their very validity.
Joanna Murray-Smith’s text is as delicate as it is boisterous in exploring and celebrating the ‘American Dream’ as it is dreamed and lived. The soap opera element is there, yet it is delivered with an insightfulness that is critically aware of the cracks within American culture.
Quentin Grant’s careful, graceful score, with hints of bird life, banjo, and guitar underscores the true depths of Andy’s musings on the pain within Murray-Smith’s text.
Beneath it all, there’s something different. Andy and Amy’s son Robbie is a powerful force in their lives. He’s there—but are they there with him?
That’s the slow burn powering Andy’s musings, desperately trying to create a safe place within himself. Good people, good children, get killed by guns. Why?
Who is at fault? What is it that causes it? What America is this?
Director David Mealor’s production is a masterpiece, letting Murray-Smith’s writing live and breathe at its own, sparse, deeply introspective, gentle pace. In Renato Musolino, is an actor who can, with patient precision and gentle calm, develop and grow Andy as a character who is as charming as he is hopeful, vain, remorseful and ultimately, lost.
Andy is without anchor. He is a mass of memory, introspection and awareness seeking new roots, new ‘answers’. He is America untethered from fantastical idealism, thrust into a dark and brutal reality that is playing out now in 2025.
Kathryn Sproul’s set is as deceptively simple as it is powerful. Her ‘wall’ works as a profound metaphor for insecurity bolstered by hope. Nic Mollison’s lighting perfectly supports Sproul’s careful, slowly darkening projection of gathering clouds, subtly guiding the audience to the point of dramatic shock.
David O’Brien
When: 24 Oct to 2 Nov
Where: Goodwood Theatre and Studios
Bookings: Sold Out
