Freydís and Gudrid is a Viking musical written and directed by Jeffrey Leiser. It revolves around two women whose relationship is rocked by a quest for vengeance. It’s more of a stage play than anything else, and if you are imagining a great deal of blood and violence set those expectations aside. This is a romantic historical drama.

All the performers can sing. The one who can’t has a good reason for it. While the singing is excellent it isn’t my preference. I feel there is a dissonance between what is being sung and how it is being sung. For example, in an early scene, Freydís sings the words, “Bodies will sink and heads will be slain.” Those are powerful words, but they’re sung with no additional fierceness, venom, or passion than anything else she sang up to that point. I crave teeth behind sentiments like that, and they are not there. She is emoting, she is embodying the sentiment physically, but it doesn’t sound how I want it to sound. That’s an incredibly selfish sentiment, but it’s true. In my head, I’m thinking, “What if a Disney villain was singing this? They would chew this up.” It comes off as unconvincing which creates a barrier between moments like that and my empathy. This is not only Freydís. There are scarcely any moments where words are emphasized outside of stretching them out. In summation, this is all more operatic than it is Broadway. The characters are decent. It takes time for many of the characters to start revealing their layers. There is a character named Hekja who could be written out. She says little and does almost nothing. Hekja doesn’t sing often, to the point where I thought she couldn’t sing at all. It may be historically accurate for her to be there, but this is entertainment, and I need to feel like her existence here is justified. The relationships are a major strength and the source of most of the character complexity. The dialogue is poetic. Everything is sung from beginning to end. It is not heavy on choruses or rhyme. If they were saying the dialogue instead of singing the dialogue, the difference would be a lot more negligible compared to other musicals.

Freydís and Gudrid is nearly two hours long. I did feel its length, but it wasn’t bad because the first and second halves are quite different. The bulk of the performances are in front of a screen. During the first half, I noticed characters who appeared unfocused, the extremity of which varied. Two people would be standing in front clear as day, and someone next to them would be blurry. Everything is in black and white. I think that was probably for the best. It looks more authentic than many low-budget productions that rely on screening, and it also helps prevent whiplash from transitioning back and forth from footage that captures real-world settings. The violence and fight choreography is what you’d expect from a play. There are no practical effects aside from props that also benefit from the black and white.

The core of Freydís and Gudrid is strong. The singing, the instrumentals, and the story are all dandy, but all biases aside there are clear hiccups. I suspect some incredibly passionate people will squeal at the thought of a new operatic Viking musical, but I don’t think there’s a lot of mass appeal here. The trailer is an honest one, so the curious should give it a look.

6 out of 10