‘Sing Street’ Review: New Wave Music as Sweet Deliverance
Ben BrantleyDecember 16, 2019: A boy presses “play,” and the world goes away. That basic, everyday magic act — variations of which have been practiced by restless adolescents since the dawn of recorded sound — takes on fresh, senses-stirring life in the opening moments of “Sing Street,” which opened on Monday night at New York Theater Workshop. This promising but still unfulfilled adaptation of John Carney’s 2016 film about a fledgling pop band in dreary Dublin begins with an unhappy family watching a television show about the discontents of being young and Irish during the 1980s recession. A voice from the screen says that it’s time for his generation to flee Ireland, that “it feels like it’s not a country for young people.”
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