Paul Scott Goodman and Miriam Gordon's Rooms: a rock romance starts off with unlimited promise but eventually becomes unconvincing and predictable.
This story of two punk rockers from Glasgow, one a super-ambitious Jewish lyricist and the other a mopey, introverted lapsed Catholic composer, seems so original at first, it doesn’t appear possible that it could ever degenerate into cliché. But halfway into Rooms, all the specificity and novelty of the story disappear, and it becomes clear that what we’re witnessing is the same old Boy Meets Girl formula with obligatory dissonance and then the inevitable Hollywood ending.
If Goodman’s songs were more attractive, maybe we wouldn’t so much mind. But with a few exceptions, the music of Rooms is immediately forgettable, and Goodman’s lyrics, though often intelligent, seldom transcend their settings.
Rooms does have some real virtues – the ingratiating acting of Nicole Kaplan and Graham Fenton, most prominently, plus Eric Davis’ kinetic staging, and the playing of the live band, directed by Matt Hinkley. Still, the end result is an odd hybrid: one ignores the narrative, enjoys the acting, merely tolerates the music, finds real flair in the direction. This is a show that does some things very well. And some things with only a bare success.
