Review: The Evangelists. The consequences of being sold to One Direction

 Does anyone else firmly believe if they had any musical talent at all that they’d be an amazing rockstar? I refuse to believe this is a me-only delusion. I wear enough eyeliner already, and I think I’d have a wardrobe to rival Chappell Roan (not to pitch two bad bitches against each other). The Evangelists is a fun reminder that, actually, I’d hate it and should be grateful for my tone deafness.

To give a quick run down – The Evangelists is a play about the fictional band, The Evangelists, and takes place in the green room in the hour before their last performance of the tour. They’ve been together for a decade, except for new guitarist Salem, and 10 years of tension come out in one night. The result is explosive.

ID: Elena Koestel Santamaria, Martha Thomson, Danny Spiezio, Mario Kehler, and Johnathan Stock. Credit: Felix Saint-Bris.

 
It’s a play set in 2012, and in many ways is about 2012, or at least a version of it. I don’t quite get the nostalgia for 2014 indie sleaze tumblr vibes – which I think is mostly because I was on the weirder sections of tumblr – but I see the appeal. The current wave of nostalgia is not only clear in the play, but also my discussion with writer Cara Scott - ‘it's such a powerful thing, invoking that - I want people to see the marketing and see the show and be like I remember that!’ The play certainly feels familiar in vibe- at one point Linus (Johnathan Stock) pulls out a bag of rolling tobacco and I immediately thought about every person I have ever known to roll their own cigarettes, and how on point that is. None of their lives were going particularly well – I think rolling is a modern-day mark of Cain.
 
There’s a lot more about the play immediately familiar to me – characters and moments that I feel like I can trace back to the real world. Cara credits her major inspirations for the band as The 1975, Paramore, early Panic at the Disco! and One Direction. Considering these influences and their effect is pretty illuminating – the band’s frontwoman Evangeline (Martha Thomson), trapped in a decade long contract signed when she was too young to know its consequences, draws inspiration from Hayley Williams. The position of being what feels like the only woman in your entire genre is an unenviable one. Cara and I talked a fair amount about Hayley Williams, how much conversation around Paramore was mired in misogyny and where that inspiration ends up in The Evangelists: ‘There’s so much about being the only woman in an all-male band at that time – she’s always going to get the most criticism, when the men can get away with so much more.’ Evangeline’s response to being trapped in the rotting corpse of the band she loved is a wonderful anger – Thomson is wonderful at contempt, and the quality of her anger means that when sympathy does break through, it feels hard earned.
 

ID: Mario and Elena.

The inspiration I find most illuminating is One Direction, or I guess more accurately the culture surrounding them. Salem (Elena Koestel Santamaria) is a mega fan of the Evangelists – has been since at least 14 – and now she’s in the band. She threw her dark hair into a messy bun and went downstairs where her mother told her she was being sold to One Direction. She’s living her own teenage fantasy – and it sucks. Koestel Santamaria’s portrayal of Salem works really wonderfully with this strange dynamic – she’s emotive and open, a stark comparison to the rest of the band, clearly displaying discomfort but still going along with the people around her. She speaks the first words of the play, telling a story about banana flavoured yoghurt and how there’s nothing she won’t do for the band – in the final scene she proves this. It’s interesting to look at Salem as a revisiting of the fan fiction trope, one that both understands the nightmare of being owned by the music industry, but still respects the wide-eyed idealism. Her status as a fan brings the confrontation between fan culture and reality directly to her bandmates, and that tension brings the other One Direction parallel into clear consideration.
 
Linus (Johnathan Stock) is the ‘funny one’ of the band, fulfilling the sweet and loveable archetype easily at first, but crumbles under pressure, especially when lying about his supposed heterosexuality. There are gay characters in this play! Yipee!!! The earliest explicit mention of Linus’ sexuality comes as a result of Salem’s questioning him on the fan theory that he and a past band member were in a relationship. It is here that the Larry Stylinson influence becomes clear – an intention that Cara and I discussed in our interview. The subject came up pretty naturally in our discussion of influences - ‘I’ve always found that phenomenon so interesting – it’s huge - Larry Stylinson is such a beast.’ Despite the … lacking evidence for an illicit gay love affair between Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson, the appeal of the narrative is obvious, and the Evangelists asks an audience to sit with the tragedy that could have been.
 

ID: Danny, Elena, Mario, Johnathan, and Martha.

I have more mixed feelings about the queerness of the play. On one hand, the queer characters of the play are deeply imperfect, messy human beings. As with much of the play, Cara’s intentional use of ‘imperfect victims’ is very refreshing. I am a big advocate for the abolishment of queer saints. On the other hand, there is a degree to which Linus’ queerness feels slightly inauthentic to me. The primary piece of evidence for his queerness is a photo of him and another band member holding hands while leaving a gay bar – something I don’t quite feel communicates the salaciousness of celebrity outings. I think for as immersed and influenced by celebrity culture the play otherwise is, this detail feels quite disconnected from this piece of community history. It’s no ‘zip me up before you go go’. This is certainly a minor issue, but I think for me it felt like a part of a pattern that subdued what could have been the very tragic bite of Linus’ situation. It feels like he doesn’t effectively bridge the gap between good fanfiction and bad fanfiction in the way he needs to, or the way the rest of the show does. The impact is lessened, however, by the fact that Linus is not the only queer character in the play  – Salem is a lesbian, and actually refers to herself as such.
 
In terms of character depth, I hate to say that Cassius (Danny Spiezio) doesn’t quite hit for me. He feels like a too exaggerated archetype of slimy manager/record exec/talent manager – something overplayed enough that when written completely straight always feels a bit odd. His coercion in the first 10 minutes felt like it was written with an impressively light touch – clear but still subtle – but as the show continued it felt out of place compared to multifaceted characters like Evangeline and Salem. I suppose that it is refreshing to complain about the lack of depth to male characters in relation to the women surrounding them, and that does soften the blow. But I think the trouble with Cassius stems from a larger issue, where at times it felt like the play didn’t quite trust the audience to understand what it was trying to say. The last scene of Salem and Evangeline alone together was really genuinely sweet, and really wonderfully twisted the knife on the tragedy of the ending. But it also felt a little bit like Poirot summoning me into a room to restate the character dynamics I’d already figured out, and in a show that otherwise navigates tension skillfully (the constant drumming is really a genius touch) it deflated a lot of the investment it had built.  
 

ID: Danny, Elena, Mario, Johnathan, and Martha.

My only other complaint is an issue that probably started with the show summary used in the marketing – where the in-fiction band are described as ‘indie-punk’. I don’t think whoever wrote that knew what punk means. I hate to trot out alternative genre discourse, but there is a reason people within the subculture are so protective of the term – in a context like this, it loses all meaning. If the Evangelists were a punk band, a lot of the play no longer works – the culture of the music industry is different, and there’s far more you can get away with. Linus’ sexuality would not be the problem on the scale it was in the play. Taking the example of Green Day (an all time favourite of mine, and probably the most mainstream punk band I can think of) – Billie Joe Armstrong came out as bisexual in 1995! I’m just going to chalk the summary up to a miscommunication, but it does illustrate another issue. I have no clue what genre the Evangelists are supposed to be – based on my conversations with Cara, I’d place them closest to The 1975, but they could be anything. For how interlinked music and fashion are, the costuming and makeup don’t betray much. This is probably far more frustrating to me than any other audience member, given where I sit on the music and fashion spectrum (for those of you unfortunate enough to not be personally acquainted, I swim somewhere between goth and metal most of the time).
 
I should briefly sing the praises of The Herons, the band playing the Sunday night gig. I had to leave a little early due to sensory issues (restaurant space acoustics are not ideal for my autistic ears) but they were incredible. The gig immediately after also worked really well for me as a continuation of the play and was such a fun detail. I cannot imagine how logistically difficult that must have been to organize, but I was very appreciative.
 
All in all, The Evangelists is a really interesting concept for a play, and the balance of nostalgia and criticism I think really does the feeling of 2012 justice. It is brilliantly acted, and an incredibly polished final product – you can really feel it’s been a year in the making. I would now urge you to run to buy a ticket, but the show is sold out! As it should be! Apparently there are a few tickets available on the door, so scramble on over to Lupo’s at 6:30 sharp and you may just get lucky.  

By Marsh (he/him)