Dream Factory

Civic Theatre, Tallaght

★★★★☆

A friend once told me the best children’s shows are the ones that make them laugh the hardest. I disagree: it’s the ones that make their parents laugh harder.

Dream Factory, a new musical, is a treat. Directed by Jennifer Jennings, a founder of the innovative theatre company Thisispopbaby (Wake and Alice in Funderland), it has all the components for a hit.

Set in the fictional town of Ballyplastic (where “life is fantastic”), it introduces us to Brida Spring (Aoife O’Sullivan), a young girl alienated by the hypercapitalistic Dream Factory that dominates society under a glitzy sheen.

The opening number borrows much from Barbie, and one can understand why its creators would chase the nostalgia tapped into by one of last year’s global cultural moments. There’s synth pop, neon lights, bright wigs and an array of overly happy citizens singing praise for the seemingly benevolent factory, a thinly veiled allegory for big business. “We’re so lucky living here, we’ve got so much stuff we hold dear,” they exclaim. “Nothing pleases me more than wearing a dress once and then throwing it away.”

But our protagonist has a longing for “something more than this”. And so begins our David-versus-Goliath melodrama, to take down the force sapping all joy and authenticity from paradise.

Throughout the show we meet a Trumpian chief executive with a hilariously soft underbelly (Cian Kinsella of Lords of Strut, creator of the comedy musical), who takes direction from a mysterious giant sheep (Ruth Berkeley), Wizard of Oz style.

In turn there’s a resistance group to the factory, rather like the A-Team if they joined a kitsch 1990s pop band. It sounds bizarre, but the plot rounds out neatly as a tale of standing up to the man.

Predictably, it concludes with the audience dancing its socks off in an effort to banish the megalomaniac sheep.

Creating a musical from scratch is no easy feat. The Cork music producer and rapper Garry McCarthy has written original songs for the show that are not only catchy and funny but also performed wonderfully by the cast. A blend of rap, hip-hop and Madonna-style pop leaves at least a few earworms.

RTÉ’s resident puppeteer, Ray Cuddihy, plays a blinder as one of the world’s last bees, lost in the endless urban abyss. Hilarious from start to finish. And the cast’s physicality brings a minimalistic set alive through trampolining and aerial acrobatics. Kate Finegan, of FemmeBizarre, dazzles on her aerial hoop in one instrumental number paying homage to the old ways. In contrast to the exciting hedonism of the Dream Factory numbers, there’s a powerful sense of grá for pre-industrialised Ireland.

Though the allegory is quite on the nose, it’s an enjoyable parody of our society’s environmental and ethical self-flagellation. The sad reality is that, although the audience are happy to play along with the show’s messaging, many get back into cars and return to lives of consumption afterwards. It seems more likely that it will fall to the younger members of the audience – much like in the show – to step up and save paradise.

Continues at the Civic Tallaght, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, until Saturday, October 5th