Ellamenope Jones

Project Cube, Dublin Until Dec 11 8.15pm (Sat mat 3pm) €18/€€14 01-8819613/14 projectartscentre.ie

Not since

Synecdoche, New York

tied up tongues a couple of years ago has an innocuous title caused such hesitation. Rest assured: to spare any embarrassment at the box office, the name of Wayne Jordan’s eagerly anticipated new musical for Randolf SD is pronounced “Ellamenope Jones”. It rhymes with “phones”.

What other mysteries await us in a musical with “a contemporary gothic” edge? Does it snarl like Bauhaus, brood like Notre Dame or spin grim yarns like Bram Stoker? With Randolph SD, a company that has always struck the right balance between grit and beauty, flavouring every wicked joke or heartbreak with piquant intelligence, its heroine may hint at the calibre of play. A diva from the gutter, she is an all-singing, all-dancing entrepreneur in the form of Kathy Rose O’Brien, and as the apex of a pyramid scheme she entrances a cabal of aspirational young Dublin women.

That makes it sound slightly like an urgent warning about our recent history, and it’s true that the show (devised from improvisation and scored for a live band by Carl Kennedy) has been in development for a while. Making a musical isn’t easy, though, and we’ll take finesse over topicality any day. After all, Ellamenope is not as simple as ABC.

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Krapp, 39 Axis, Dublin