Begin Again - Play

Begin Again opens with a songwriter singing to a bar that is not listening, and a record executive at the back who has been fired that afternoon and is drunk enough to hear something in it. Gretta wrote the song about the boyfriend who has just left her for a bigger career. Dan hears an album.

Neither of them has any money, so they make the record outdoors, in the street, on rooftops, in a subway tunnel, hiring musicians they cannot pay and using the noise around them as the arrangement. The collaboration works. What complicates it is everything else: Dan's marriage is over in all but name, his teenage daughter has stopped speaking to him, and Gretta's ex is calling again now that her songs have started to matter.

The musical is adapted from John Carney's 2013 film, with a book by Jenna Clark Embrey and Molly Beach Murphy, and music and lyrics by Pat Monahan of the band Train, with Jerry Becker and Matt Musty. Lorin Latarro directs and David Neumann choreographs.

The score is written for performers who play as well as sing, because most of the numbers happen inside the story: the characters are writing, rehearsing or recording the songs the audience is hearing, which keeps the music part of the plot rather than a pause in it.

The ending is the reason the story has lasted, and it survives the adaptation. Two people the plot has obviously arranged to fall in love decide instead that the record was the point, and both of them turn out to be right.