To be honest, the performance is hard to write about. Musicals are expensive, but this production delights in its low budget with a campy-cheap style that utilizes every object smartly and frugally. Musicals are ridiculous, but ‘Journey To The Center Of The Earth: The Musical’ amps that to the nth degree. Starring Kári Viðarsson as Otto, Smári Gunnarsson as Axel, his student, Stephanie Lewis in a variety of different roles, and a chorus of local children and pre-teens, the production is beautifully tongue-in-cheek.
As the Freezer Hostel is only a twenty-minute drive from the famed hole, the show is pertinent, in the way that it would be if a small hotel in Bali mounted a production of ‘Eat, Pray, Love: The Opera’. The carnivalesque extravaganza presents Jules Verne’s familiar story of German professor Otto Lidenbrock’s pilgrimage to Snæfellsjökull, where he begins his fantastic voyage. I don’t like writing universally positive reviews-it feels a bit like a marketing campaign-but this show is, without hyperbole, incredible, hysterical, well thought-out and, seriously, better than ‘Hamilton’.1
That said, you cynical happiness haters, open your mind, drive the two and a half hours to Rif’s Freezer Hostel, sit your ass down on a stool, and go see the hostel’s production of ‘Journey To The Center Of The Earth: The Musical’. Musicals are a divisive subject, especially for those whose only exposure to the genre has been the film adaptation of ‘Les Misérables’ or their grandmother blasting Sarah Brightman’s version of “Memory” from ‘Cats’.