Cast

Synopsis

It is the 1970s and Anna Antonelli is selling the shabby roller rink she inherited on the boardwalk of some seaside town. Demolition men become characters that drift into old memories of the place. But just as they prepare to tear it all down, her estranged daughter Angel, a hippy drifter – who hasn’t been home for seven years – turns up.

Their relationship remains fractious – mother critical, daughter dismissive – it slowly softens with shared memories, as their family home gives up its ghosts. Their battle boils down to preserving the past or moving with the times.

That tussle (incorporating fantastic tunes and a witty, poignant script) finds echoes in their family history as two versions of a disputed past slowly cohere. A great musical to close the season!

Directors Notes

The Rink is a dark and brave musical, which has the courage of frequent flashbacks into scenes of family life sketched across twenty uneasy years, as well as the intelligence to break the old boy-gets-girl musical format and give it instead the more complex story of a mother and daughter trying, often without much success, to get back together again after a seven year estrangement. I first directed The Rink some thirty years ago. Returning to it now with that amount of life experience under my belt I saw many of the themes of the musical through fresh eyes, realising and appreciating Anna’s viewpoint all the more. The writing team have created a memory musical of sorts in much the same way that Tennessee Williams did with The Glass Menagerie. It’s easy to look at the past with rose-tinted glasses – we’ve all glamorised the past at some stage in our lives.

What we find under the roller-coaster, next to the jungle ride, right of the caterpillar, left of the waterslide, is a lament for a lost America where dreams were still possible and the bulge in a guy’s trousers didn’t always have to mean a gun; but a dazzling series of showstoppers suggests that these two women are still capable of taking the roof off any show place in town, even if their own is in imminent danger of demolition by the wreckers.

In the end, and surprisingly enough, The Rink is about restoration of magic to a family and to a fairground, and maybe even to a nation. “Here’s to the rink and all of us together – I’ll drink to that!”