‘King of Pangaea’ faces grief with musical fantasy at Lyric

Last Updated on March 26, 2024, 6:43 PM | Published: March 26, 2024

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Try as we might, we just can’t make sense of death.

We know that it’s an unavoidable reality, one of the very few guarantees in life, and yet, any time that death takes someone close to us, it feels new and singular and just wrong, as if it’s all just a horrible mistake.

That’s especially true when you lose a parent.

It’s an experience captured beautifully, heartbreakingly, and with often shocking honesty in Martin Storrow’s “King of Pangaea,” a brand-new fantasy musical currently running at Lyric Theatre now through April 7th.

Through an outlandish adventure weaving together childish imagination, parental fairy tale, and even Judaic mythology, Storrow’s deeply personal tale takes us on a journey alongside young Christopher Crow as he navigates those same unexplainable, ineffable paths of grief.

When Christopher is still just a young daydreaming boy, imagining himself the king of his own rainbow-colored, unbroken world of Pangaea, his mother is diagnosed with cancer, leaving their tightly-knit nuclear family to put on brave faces and lean hard on all the usual hopes and faiths.

But it works. The cancer goes into remission, and the family’s relentlessly sunny positivity seems validated.

Christopher grows to adulthood, leaves behind his imaginary Pangaea.

And then the cancer comes back. And then it spreads quickly. And then she dies.

All at once, all the sunshine and hope and faith don’t feel like actual answers to anything for Christopher anymore. All that’s left is confusion over how things could change so quickly, how he and his parents’ hopes could be so wrong, and above all, how his mother could keep her worsening state a secret from him.

And then things get really confusing when a 1000-year-old tap dancer named Elijah shows up and tells him that he can help him get to the Pangaea of his dreams, where he can get all the answers he wants and where no one ever has to die.

And so begins Christopher’s adventures through his own looking glass, crossing paths with a hapless ship captain, a stargazing deck swab, a tutor-guide with a death wish, and most poignantly, his own younger self.

Along the way, the songs that propel the story trace the arc of childhood to maturity to loss, opening big with the almost sugary parental reassurance of “Time Rises” and gradually opening up to reveal harder questions and darker answers, often built into clever couplets and fantastic turns of phrase.

Ship shanty “The Thing About the River” is the kind of galloping show tune that lodges in your brain for days (in the best way) and pseudo-rap “The Curriculum” defies expectation to become an undeniably catchy, rousing showstopper sure to garner healthy applause at every coming show.

The centerpiece, both musically and thematically, is surely “The Puzzle,” a duet between both the adult and child versions of Christopher as they linger in the hospital waiting room of his memory attempting to solve any number of probably impossible puzzles.

It’s an apt and accurate metaphor for the mourning of a parent, journeying back through your own childhood hopes and dreams and confronting your younger self and your own memories of a time when you could still believe that magic was real and that death could be defeated.

Unsurprisingly, it comes from Storrow’s own life.

Already an impressively accomplished songwriter, composer, and performer with multiple albums and credits under his belt, Storrow admits that he began compiling material for what would become “King of Pangaea” with no clear direction or plan.

It wasn’t until some friends encouraged him to really consider and explore the mythical island in his disconnected new songs that he realized the Pangaea he was writing about was the world he’d escape to when faced with these very real challenges as a child.

Storrow really did lose his mother to cancer in the same way. He really did struggle with all the same lingering, unanswerable questions as the character of Christopher. In a small Q&A following Lyric’s opening night, he even showed the audience the real envelope on which his mother had drawn a whimsical, colorful picture just like the one that Christopher finds in the play, setting him off on his odyssey toward Pangaea.

Even after connecting the dots of the songs and the story, “King of Pangaea” was still just an idea. It wasn’t until Storrow performed some of the songs sans production in a New York preview event for theatrical projects that Lyric producers fell in love. Creating a joint production between OKC’s Lyric Theatre and Georgia’s Aurora Theatre, the show could begin taking shape for its world premiere right here in The Plaza.

To bring Storrow’s story of grief and wonder to life, they wouldn’t need a large cast, but it would have to be a remarkable one, blending talents from between Oklahoma and Georgia.

Lead Logan Corley and 11-year-old Riley McCool in the joint role of Christopher Crow both handily steal the entire show in a heavily demanding role requiring not only deep sentiment and impressive pipes, but a measure of believability in them being the same person.

Luckily, they happen to look strikingly similar already, a fortuitous fluke of casting, according to director Michael Baron.

The band Lyric has assembled for these shows is unbeatable, featuring the notable talents of drummer and experimental percussionist James Metcalfe and the guitar of OKC prog/theater virtuoso Jay Gleason, who downplays beautifully and tastefully throughout the show, in fantastic service of the always intimate, human songs.

All taken together, from the impossibly tight cast to the soul-stirring, heartbreaking songs, to even the gorgeously multicolored, tree-covered stage design, “King of Pangaea” feels like a deeply personal vision come to life – appropriately, like a dream come true.

This is an important production for Lyric and for OKC theater as a whole, as it’s easy to see “King of Pangaea” evolving eventually into a full-blown national hit musical over the next decade.

But there’s a greater and surely more powerful importance here, as this story likely stands as one of the most honest and astute explorations of real grief and the complexities of mourning that maybe any musical theater boards have ever seen.

Simply put: see it while you can.

“King of Pangaea” by Martin Storrow is running now through April 7th at Lyric Theatre in The Plaza.

For show times, tickets, and more information, visit lyrictheatreokc.com.

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