A love story by land and by sea, and quality time in the tub! The Shape of Seamen, a Fringe review

The strangest visions come your way when you go to the Fringe. I dreamed I saw a sailor, still in his slicker and sou’wester hat, in a bathtub with a beautiful size-large mermaid.

The sailor has fallen madly in love with this salt-water siren,  and he’s carried her home. And, accompanied by the live band (two fish, one on guitar, one on accordian), they are singing together— jaunty sea shanties, patter songs, love ballads, all original.

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The Shape of Seamen is through-sung, and the songs are, impressively, all in rhymed couplets, an achievement in itself: Gilbert and Sullivan on acid, with the voluptuous mermaid as the Little Buttercup stand-in (lie-in really, since there’a this matter of the tail). The exposition, such as it is, unrolls in recitative.

This kooky, seductively nutty “new comic opera” for two, from the endlessly inventive indie duo Walters & Watt (Let’s Not Turn On Each Other), is written, composed, and directed by Jacquelin Walters. And Michael Watt stars opposite their frequent director Nicole Maloney.

This love affair pretty much skews the sailor’s work/life balance when it comes time for him to leave his “briny beloved,” even temporarily, for his day job. And there are, as you might imagine, other potential relationship challenges with this sea-land duality — the sailor’s jilted -ex Shelley (Maloney), for one, a cautionary, fierce old salt (Watt) for another, not to mention the whole cross-species compatibility thing. Sirens, as you may recall, are a handful, and have a tendency to drown men, especially when they’re crossed.

Walter’s music is clever and odd. And her production, that starts in the tub, really occupies the Spotlight cabaret space, with do-it-yourself ingenuity assisted from time to time by the audience. And the performers are quick on the uptake with improvised asides. Watt has a kind of blithe, Peter Pan-esque quality, and when Calliope the mermaid sprouts toes and fingers and loses the tail, he launches himself out of the bathtub and into the crowd with gusto. “Let me rise above my nature….”

Maloney has one of those trilling G&S soprano voices at her disposal, and switches amusingly between the love-struck seaman and the outraged Other Woman (“am I not hot enough to be victimized?”).

This is a uniquely idiosyncratic kind of rom-com — silly and smart — from renegade talents you should be following.