Brighton Year-Round 2026
Shadowed Dreamer
Stephen Hart
Genre: Autobiography, Biographical Drama, Contemporary, Fringe Theatre, International, LGBTQ+ Theatre, One Person Show, Queer Theatre, Short Plays, Theatre
Venue: The Lantern Theatre Studio, Brighton
Festival: Brighton Year-Round
Low Down
After its Broadway premiere in 2009-10, Stephen Hart’s Shadowed Dreamer is again revived at the Lantern Theatre, Brighton directed by Richard Pepper till August 5, with music by Max Wilson.
Exceptionally warmly recommended.
Review
After its Broadway premiere in 2009-10, Stephen Hart’s Shadowed Dreamer is again revived at the Lantern Theatre, Brighton directed by Richard Pepper till August 5, with music by Max Wilson.
There’s plenty of A-words here. How do you answer adoption, abuse, affirmation, abuse, abandonment? Sometimes there’s a loving relationship inside a bunch of fives, and usually not. Perhaps with a song.
After some years’ success – including a lead in a Lloyd Webber musical – Stephen Hart needed to confront whatever had driven him away from the limelight he was always certain was his birthright. A final incident though drove him back into himself and a conviction he’d be dead soon. What happened? Indeed after everything related here, you wonder at how one star can pack in so much misfortune and emerging smelling of success.
Hart, someone who’s played the West End and Broadway as actor and musical theatre star, is a performer whose ability hardly needs underscoring. Yet here – as he has been doing on occasion from 2009 – he’s’ broaching himself. The masks of theatre performer and character are stripped away. Perhaps to be replaced by a theatre-self, a more complex sleight of reveals. This is one possibility but the only filter in this extraordinary narrative seems to be what in this 65 minute narrative Hart has decided he can’t fit in. It is though artfully constructed as a chronological and detailed storyline.
It’s aided by a small clutch of projections – photographs of Hart’s adopted parents. They’re not strictly necessary though of coure ad to the texture of what would be a bare and normally magical space. Only this one seems populated by the curses of the past.
The reveal is that Hart didn’t discover his adoption till he was 15 and a half. Taken in by Stanley and Lou their early life seemingly conventional was broken by his adoptive mother’s schizo-affective behaviour her myriad internal characters and her abrupt leaving. She’s replaced by the terrifying Terri who brings in her own two children, only to grade them in levels of violence inflicted. The injuries sustained, the terror inflicted, is frankly almost unbelievable. This isn’t ancient Britain, but one of a few decades ago. And a Birmingham and Glasgow so detailed you can smell and touch it.
Indeed Hart’s story is given added authority by the way he relates images of a precise suffering – a moon blanched hope at a low-point of living- rough – to a highpoint, and metaphor.
To relate the shock of Hart’s narrative would be to anticipate reactions to it. Suffice to say the ping-pong of his adoptive mother’s re-entrance and escape from the hell of his adoptive-at-one-remove mother’s tyranny – Stanley never intervened – would be to blunt the impact of telling. A few details however are imperative. At one point Stephen’s calling his adoptive mother from a phone-box after the family phone is tor out of its sockets by Terri as he speaks. But the phone box has an empty pane and he’s grabbed by his hair backwards.
After stupefying levels of violence and comparative calm, there’s more crises,, resulting in Stephen’s living rough whilst still attending school, then forced to endure a sadistically-bullying regime of elder peers in a home, till he’s gifted a flat at 16.
From there Stephen, encouraged from 15 to perform, discovers the light goes on, and never entirely dims. And his relation of discovering members of his birth-family are both heart-warming as well as exciting, and sad.
Others have come after Hart’s narrative, crafting their own fictions. But this – a Broadway-acclaimed show that ran from 2009-10 – is the ur-text of survival. There’s many other stories, some not included. Hart relates his discovery of his sexuality sand gay experiences towards the end because the narrative demands it for one last kick. Hart temporarily dropped away from performance but Shadowed Dreamer ensured he cold roar back.
Since then he’s acted again quite extensively, as well as taught drama and become an advocate for many young people, including some on the East Side of New York.
Covid changed some of that. Hart’s agent has retired and it seems the right time to revive this small classic of survival and coming-into-self that Hart celebrates beyond any other of its kind I know.
No wonder the rafters echo when he does what all musical theatre people do. And sings. Scott Evans is delivered in ringing tones. Hart ha of course a musical theatre voice of bell-like authority and heft. It has to be the one song at the climactic moment. But I do wish Hart could make this a slightly more song-studded show. Nevertheless, his judgement is probably right!
Stephen Hart has a YouTube channel, and is involved with various charities listed below Exceptionally warmly recommended.
David Fray, apart from being designer and media is also lighting and tech designer.
Thanks to Paraminder Sekhon and Haz, Angelina Nambia, Liza Shearer, Pank Seithi Jacqui Godfrey, Sally and Water Rats Theatre, The Terrence Higgins Trust, Mareike Guensche, Molly, Kieron and Irene.
