Germaine Konji is a quadruple threat as she acts, moves, sings and raps.Elijah Nichols
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- Title: Dixon Road
- Book, music and lyrics by: Fatuma Adar
- Director: Ray Hogg
- Actors: Germaine Konji, Gavin Hope, Starr Domingue
- Company: The Music Stage Company in partnership with Obsidian Theatre
- Venue: Canadian Stage High Park Amphitheatre
- City: Toronto, Ont.
- Year: To June 19, 2022
Reroute your GPS from 42nd Street and Avenue Q; the current hot location on the musical-theatre map is Dixon Road.
Fatuma Adar’s promising new musical of that name, now having a short, outdoor world-premiere run in the High Park Amphitheatre, is about a well-off Somali family who become refugees due to civil unrest at home. They end up living in one of the apartment buildings clustered on Dixon Road in the west end area of Toronto known as Little Mogadishu.
Adar, a talented composer and writer who is herself Somali-Canadian, has written a love letter to her community that ably and entertainingly explores the internal shifts, both welcome and unwelcome, that accompany international displacement.
Dixon Road follows the Hussein family from one July 1 to the next – from Somali Independence Day in Mogadishu in 1990, to Canada Day in Toronto in 1991.
As that year begins, the Husseins are living a prosperous life in Somalia – and trying to tune out the increasing signs that it is on the brink of civil war.
The optimistic paterfamilias Zaki (Gavin Hope) is a photographer who has just been appointed to a prominent role in the government, while Safiya (Starr Dominigue), his wife, keeps occupied managing a big household with the help of maids.
Michael-Lamont Lytle as Abdi and Gavin Hope as Zaki.Elijah Nichols
The future is more obviously uncertain, however, from the perspective of their teenage daughter Batoul (Germaine Konji), whose graduation ceremony has just been cancelled due to safety concerns.
An explosion at an Independence Day event makes the Hussein family face facts – and consider fleeing the country to Canada. Not everyone is equally – or at all – on board with that plan, however. The way Batoul, who is a budding spoken-word poet, puts it is, “Stick with the devil we know / or risk it all in the snow?”
It’s ultimately a huge adjustment when most of this Black Muslim family arrives in Toronto at Christmas time – and ends up moving into a one-bedroom apartment with a family friend named Abdi (Michael-Lamont Lytle) and his son, Youssef (Danté Price).
In Canada, Batoul finds herself with new options as a young woman – enough that, in some ways, choosing is overwhelming. A university education and following her dream of being a writer suddenly seem possible.
For Zaki, however, this new country quickly chips away at his confidence, his sense that opportunity is always around the corner; Abdi offers him a job driving a cab right away, but Zaki starts applying to jobs at universities and libraries that he is qualified for but can’t land due to language barriers and racism.
It takes Zaki a long time to swallow his pride – Hope’s depiction of this is heartbreaking – and an intriguing dynamic in the show involves how eagerly Abdi, who didn’t live as privileged a life as Zaki back in Somalia, enjoys watching him swallow it. (My favourite song in the score was Abdi’s Miskeen (Poor You), a funky bit of schadenfreude.)
Director Ray Hogg’s production of Dixon Road is full of lively, layered performances – and Konji, in particular, delivers what should be a star-making one as Batoul; she’s a quadruple threat given how well she acts, moves, sings and raps.
Omar Forrest.
Adar shows tremendous talent as a theatrical songwriter. The musical styles she showcases range from Afrofunk to Disney movies of the 1990s (many tunes have a real Alan Menken flavour), while her lyrics quickly take up asylum in your mind the way the best do. (During a brief rain delay of the show, I found myself singing to myself: “Suck it up and take what you can / That’s how to be an immigrant, that’s how to be Canadian.”)
I’m really enjoying the fact that Musical Stage Company, who’s co-producing this show with Obsidian Theatre in association with Canadian Stage, has started staging musicals at the High Park Amphitheatre that used to only showcase Shakespeare in the summer. Honestly, Dixon Road seems to me exactly the kind of work that should be staged in such an inclusive venue in a city like Toronto.
But I must admit I found a full two-act musical sitting on the ground hard on the bottom, even with a cushion, compared to watching 90-minute, abridged classics there.
It’s hard to say entirely for certain (because the performance of Dixon Road I saw had the aforementioned rain delay, part of it was resourcefully and charmingly presented with the cast sitting in chairs while the stage dried) but I felt Adar’s show didn’t entirely justify its two-and-half-hour length at the moment, even putting uncomfortable seating aside.
There’s a lot of circling back to the same themes in the second act; I suspect it either needs a B-plot, or to kill a few darlings and drop down to one act.
With further work, however, there’s definitely potential for Dixon Road to have life after this summer run. Stories about the civil wars that develop in new Canadian families between older and younger generations have long found avid audiences in this country, from David French’s Leaving Home to Ins Choi’s Kim’s Convenience – it’s kind of surprising we haven’t seen more musicals tackle this relatable subject matter.
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J. Kelly Nestruck