Conventional wisdom labels musicals as a large-stage art form. 

Song-and-dance spectacle requires space to dazzle, customarily populated by as many dancing bodies as the budget affords.

When staged in smaller houses, productions tend to move away from choreography, rooting the show instead in a more static corporeality. OR, they go the immersive route, blocking the movement throughout the house on every side of the audience. 

While Picnic at Hanging Rock has some of that, this new musical primarily leans in to the advantages of Greenwich House’s intimate confines. Transfer it to a grander venue, and potentially smack in to a common bugaboo of musicals: failing to properly fill the entire stage, resulting in static inertia uncomfortably hovering above in the dead air. 

But Picnic at Hanging Rock’s dancing bodies overflow from Greenwich House’s cramped quarters; the boards audibly creak, and the walls rumble and reverberate from the turnt force of their beautiful, sad, melancholic, ambitious, inspirational, but repressed  music pushing beyond their existential confinement…

Can you say: thematic?

The scant room to navigate catalyzes kinetic energy like an enzyme. 

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Picnic at Hanging Rock applies to enter two canons:

Musicals for outdoor stages, and musicals for teenage theater-programs.