Precipice at New Diorama Theatre review: 'an insult to the audience’s intelligence'

New musical Precipice at New Diorama Theatre - (Alex Brenner)

It’s the talented quintet of actor-singer-musicians I feel sorry for, trapped in this dumbass musical about apocalypse survivors in a Greenwich tower block and forced to sing some of the worst rhymes ever written. Precipice is an awkward assemblage of slapdash songs and dystopian clichés, and its faults are the direct result of an experimental creative process that’s well-intentioned but fatally flawed.

Frustrated at the limitations he perceived on both the form and the content of musicals, polymath Adam Lenson recruited five other composers and lyricists to work together for 50 days over two years on a work of “collective imagination”. The result is a po-faced work about societal collapse in which, Lenson writes in the programme, “no single idea, lyric, or bar of music can be attributed to one author”. Which calls to mind the old joke that a camel is a horse designed by a committee.