Maria Severa: an enchanting score with clichéd lyrics

Julie Martell as Maria and Saccha Dennis as Jasmine in Maria Severa at the Shaw Festival.

If Maria Severa comes across as an awkward exercise in cultural tourism, well, at least co-creators Jay Turvey and Paul Sportelli are upfront about how it came about.

In their playwrights' note, the composer and lyricist team describe being on vacation in Portugal six years ago and reading about the longing, urban musical style known as fado and the legendary fadista Maria Severa Onofriana in a Lisbon city travel guide. "In those half-dozen sentences, we realized we may have found the seeds of a musical," they write.

For those of you without a Lonely Planet Portugal on hand: From the poor, Moorish neighbourhood of Lisbon known as the Mouraria, Maria Severa Onofriana's life is the stuff of local legend – not to mention a number of songs, plays and movies. The first star of fado – a music renowned around the world as the "Portuguese blues" – is said to have been a prostitute who sang in her mother's tavern, but the only certainties are her birth and death dates. Dying in 1846 at age 26, she beat the 27 Club of Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain by a year.

In Turvey and Sportelli's telling, Maria Severa (a powerful Julie Martell) actually invents fado, with its intense emotions and undulating rhythms like waves crashing against the shore, along with her adopted brother, a guitarist named Carlos (Jeff Irving).

An aristocratic bullfighter named Armando (Mark Uhre) falls in love with Maria after hearing her, and she follows suit after watching him in the ring. Armando's mother Constanca (Sharry Flett) wants her son to marry the daughter of a rich friend, however, because their fortune has fallen on hard times. That's essentially the plot, really more of a situation that stagnates until a crisis is induced.

Turvey and Sportelli's score is, at times, quite enchanting, fusing the heart of fado into a headier form of composition associated with post-Sondheim musicals.

But the words are another matter – and it's very difficult to believe in this world and these characters or the creators' handle on them right from the get-go. At times the lyrics are so literal, they seem like stage directions – or perhaps a description lifted from a tourist guide. "There is a song; there is a singer; there's a guitar; and there's a player in a tavern on a narrow winding street in the Mouraria, the poorest part of town in Lisbon," sings Carlos, over the opening notes.

Elsewhere, the songs are littered with clichés or lines repurposed from such sources as English-language nursery rhymes ("Star light, star bright") or Tennyson ("Ours is not to question why" goes the refrain of Maria's big fado hit).

As with the titular heroine of Michel Tremblay's 1976 play Saint Carmen of the Main, Maria Severa is powerful and dangerous to the established order because she sings about her real life and the people and places she knows; Turvey and Sportelli seem unaware of the irony.

Truthfully, it's nice that someone owes a debt to Portugal for once, instead of the other way around. But Maria Severa also has IOUs outstanding to a number of more famous musicals too. In its unaffecting climax, it brings to mind Les Miserables, while The Bullfighting Song – in which two classes clash in the audience of a sporting event involving animals – seems almost a parody of the Ascot Gavotte number from My Fair Lady. Under the skillful direction of artistic director Jackie Maxwell, the cast is fully committed at least, if not always entirely convincing in their attempts to conjure a more dramatic, Mediterranean atmosphere than we're used to seeing on stage at the Shaw Festival. (The cast's unnecessary Portuguese accents disappear or migrate towards Ireland as the night progresses.) I did admire Martell's fierce, heartfelt Maria – she communicates a strong sense of willfulness and pride, and does a fair impression of a fadista with the material provided. Jenny L. Wright gets laughs as Maria's mother, while Neil Barclay is sympathetic as a progressive priest.

The second act gets bogged down in tunes sung by secondary characters, which is largely a problem because they turn out to be more interesting than the main ones. Saccha Dennis is compelling as Jasmine, a black Brazilian who escaped slavery and who sings a song about her brutal life, while Jacqueline Thair, as Armando's rich intended, gets a nice moment with her solo about a life of quieter desperation.

Maria Severa continues through Sept. 23.

Maria Severa