Indigo - a new musical that colours outside the lines

★★★

Out of the blue, a new musical can completely take your heart. That's what happens with Indigo, enjoying its UK premiere in Curve's studio.

The cast of Indigo, by Manuel Harlan

It's the perfect place for the piece - small enough to feel as though you've been let in on a secret, large enough for the spectacle that the design team has conjured up.

Scott Evan Davis and Kait Kerrigan have coloured outside of the lines in what a musical can be about. At the surface, it follows three generations of disconnected women navigating living under one roof for the first time while dealing with Alzheimer’s, autism, and synaesthesia. The house, not yet a home, is wooden and beige; it breaks into two as fractured relationships ripple through the family.

But slowly, colour is added. Elaine (Lisa Maxwell) arrives with crocheted toilet covers before Emma's (Katie Cailean) canvases fill the walls - her paintbrush a magic wand, conjuring the images she sees when she hears people talk.

In her stage debut, Cailean embodies her role with care. She sneaks adventures that will be half-forgotten with a woman she half-recognises, with Maxwell's turn so familiar it both breaks and mends my heart to see a version of a grandmother I once knew. Floating in their orbit is Rebecca Trehearn's unreachable Beverly, a woman whose only moments of happiness arrive at the end of the 90-minute runtime.

There are some lovely supporting characters in Hugo Rolland's sunny friend-to-all, Tyler, Nuno Queimado's empathetic Rick, and Tania Mathurin's assured social worker, Alicia. They provide both light comic relief and predictable reassurance and encouragement as the plot gets more and more tangled, with the men, disappointing, ultimately the ones to unite the women. Conceived by Jay Kuo, Lorenzo Thione and Davis, there are ideas on top of ideas. There's a feeling of artistry so passionate that they haven't known when to draw a line, adding more and more colour that the water becomes murky.

Director Catie Davis does a lovely job utilising Andrzej Goulding's set, and Jake DeGroot's vivid lighting works beautifully with Susan Kulkarni's developed costumes, each person assigned a Pantone. The overall effect is akin to seeing the world through the eyes of the non-verbal Emma as she learns to communicate in new ways with new people. Her emotions are delivered only through song; there are some special tunes, and on stage, the voices are excellent, same for the out of sight, clear five-piece band, but they begin to fade into one vast landscape. We learn more from the bold artwork itself, borrowed from neurodiverse artist Viktor Bevanda and crave the rush of creation, willing Emma to show more of her pieces to the audience.

There's something special about the idea of Indigo. I can't stop thinking about it. And maybe that's all you need from art.