ajhlovestheatre

THE SOUND OF MUSIC

Music by Richard Rodgers

Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II

Book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse

Directed by Adam Penford

Chichester Festival Theatre, Chichester – until 3 September 2023

https://www.cft.org.uk/events/the-sound-of-music

Aside from The King And I and Yul Brynner’s indelible flawed monarch on screen, on Broadway originally and in countless international revivals, nothing else in the Rodgers and Hammerstein canon of classic musicals is as inextricably tied to one star performer as The Sound of Music. Julie Andrews never played Maria Von Trapp on stage (the show and role were created for American showbiz sweetheart Mary Martin, who had previously starred in the same team’s South Pacific) but mention The Sound of Music and the first image in most people’s minds will be of the youthful Julie in the film version, arms outstretched and hands splayed, twirling ecstatically atop an Alp as she soars through the rapturous title song. It’s a long shadow to escape from, and Adam Penford’s captivating new production at Chichester simultaneously celebrates that popular vision of this beloved property while also throwing up a few surprises of its own.

Most stage revivals tend to incorporate the changes and additions made for the movie (the inclusion of “I Have Confidence”, written specifically for Andrews in the film, the iconic “My Favourite Things” as a mood lifter for the frightened Von Trapp children during a thunderstorm, “The Lonely Goatherd” presented as a puppet show by the kids to impress Elsa, their potential new stepmum…). This version however goes back to the first 1959 stage iteration, honouring the original (and meticulously crafted) book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crowse, and the result is a show more sophisticated, less sugary sweet and altogether more dramatic than I remembered.

Back in are “How Can Love Survive” and “No Way To Stop It”, the tart, cynical duets for Elsa and her friend Max, the former dealing with financial expediency versus romance, and the latter with the rise of Nazism, while “My Favourite Things” is, as in the original, a duet at the top of the show for the Mother Abbess (Janis Kelly, exquisite) and Maria, and the yodel-happy goatherd number is returned to its positioning as the children’s storm distraction, complete with joyous, thigh-slapping choreography by Lizzi Gee. The London Palladium version that followed the game-changing BBC How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria? TV casting contest tried to meld together elements of the Broadway original with the movie version and resulted in something messy and unfocused, if enjoyable. This is infinitely more satisfying.

Penford and team aren’t trying for a wholesale reinvention like the current Daniel Fish Oklahoma!; it’s not even as much of a rethink as Daniel Evans’s terrific South Pacific for this venue a couple of years ago, with which it shares a leading lady, the luminescent Gina Beck (and more on her in a moment…) but a rare chance to see the piece as first written rather than mashing up the original work with the film. This is still the same sentimental, open-hearted, family friendly creation that has delighted musical lovers for generations: the songs continue to transport and bring a lump to the throat, the kids are still adorable; but the shadows are fractionally darker and the emotional ante is a little more elevated.

I suspect the main reason for this is that it is, for the most part, superbly acted. Edward Harrison’s Captain has a heartbreaking, borderline disturbing, detachment and edge of darkness borne of genuine loss: watching him respond to hearing his children sing for the first time is deeply moving. The Elsa of Emma Williams is more warm and likeable than usual, she’s not just some snooty sophisticate trying to drive a wedge between a man and his inconvenient kids, but a fully rounded woman who cares very deeply about her possible new family yet is acutely aware she is like a fish out of water; some of her martini-dry line readings are extremely funny, and humanising her makes the unspoken contest between her and the adored Maria all the more fascinating.

Lauren Conroy invests older daughter Liesl with intelligence and a subtle toughness that is miles away from the saccharine portrayals of yore, suggesting the pain of a young woman who unwillingly has had to be many things to many people following the death of her mother. Opposite her, Dylan Mason’s delivery boy Rolf is ardent and graceful, then convincingly undergoes a chilling transformation before a final moment of tormented nobility. Opera star Janis Kelly suggests a real woman underneath the Mother Abbess’s robes and rightfully brings the house down with the legendary “Climb Every Mountain”.

The beating heart of the production though is Gina Beck’s Maria, a creation of such magnetism, musicality, emotional depth and irrepressible good humour that she almost succeeds in obliterating memories of most previous interpreters of the role. Whether standing up to the Captain in defence of his children, befriending the lovelorn Liesl, or engineering the family escape from the impending threat of the Nazis, she’s strong, centred and entirely credible. Her rapport with the kids feels genuine, her deadpan comedy is pretty wondrous and she makes something deeply affecting out of Maria’s crisis over her feelings for Von Trapp versus her commitment to God. She’s sunny but rock solid, the kind of woman you would always want on your side. Her acting is so vivid and her singing so organically tied to her character choices that it is almost a surprise when she suddenly produces fearless, crystalline top notes….but it’s an exhilarating surprise, or rather a reminder that she’s played several classic soprano roles, including Christine Daaé, Wicked’s Glinda and as an entrancing Magnolia in Daniel Evan’s flawless Sheffield then West End Showboat. Beck’s Maria is so breathtakingly fresh that it feels a shame that the design team decided to give her a wig, admittedly a very convincing one, that recalls Andrews’s hair from the film. It inevitably invites unhelpful comparisons and is a rare misstep in a production that otherwise gets so much right.

Musical supervisor Gareth Valentine’s fourteen piece band occasionally lack the orchestral sweep that this score ideally needs, but for the most part wrap Rodger’s famed melodies in the glint and sparkle of a mountain stream, and the choral singing from the fine company of female voices (the nuns!) is absolutely gorgeous. No stage production can realistically expect to replicate the astonishing Alpine vistas of the movie, but Robert Jones’s handsome granite-like sets have a sculptural quality that works beautifully, especially when atmospherically lit by Johanna Town, and some of the interiors that swing on and off are attractive and opulent. The overall visual impression of the production is perhaps darker than one might have expected, but it feels lush and dramatic.

All in all, The Sound of Music isn’t perhaps the strongest in the R&H portfolio: South Pacific is probably more intelligent, Carousel more emotionally resonant and Oklahoma! more vibrant, it has moments of irredeemable tweeness, and some of Hammerstein’s lyrics sacrifice clarity and concision to syrupy mawkishness: “like a lark who is learning to pray”?! Nevertheless it remains a fine example of musical theatre from the Golden Age of Broadway. This is a truly lovely production of it, and Ms Beck reconfirms her position as one of this country’s most irresistible musical theatre leading ladies. Well worth the trip to the South Downs.

THE WIND AND THE RAIN

by Merton Hodge

Directed by Geoffrey Beevers

Finborough Theatre, London – until 5 August 2023

https://finboroughtheatre.co.uk

The Finborough’s house policy of programming interesting neglected plays of yesteryear alongside their regular roster of new writing and UK premieres is an admirable one. It has thrown up several treats over the years (2013’s London Wall got a West End transfer and last year’s female-driven Scottish costume drama The Straw Chair was an enchanting rediscovery) but, my goodness, the wheels have come off with this tedious disinterment.

Merton Hodge’s The Wind And The Rain (the title is taken from Feste’s song in Twelfth Night, quoted in the text) was a major popular hit in the 1930s, clocking up over a thousand performances in the West End, six months on Broadway and becoming a staple of repertory theatres up and down the land. However, tastes change, attention spans shrink, hope withers and the will to live can get lost: watching The Wind And The Rain in 2023, in it’s first staging in eighty years, it is pretty hard to see what the appeal was.

Set entirely in the study of an Edinburgh students boarding house, overseen by the dour but not unkind landlady Mrs McFie (played with exactly the right level of grimly unsmiling fortitude by Jenny Lee), the play centres on trainee doctor Charles Tritton (Joe Pitts) whose initial plan to get back to London and his needy mother and on-off sweetheart as soon as possible, is scuppered when he meets New Zealand sculptor Anne (Naomi Preston-Low). Charles and Anne are terribly dull company however, and his fellow student lodgers are not so much characters as non sequiturs made flesh.

There’s a lot of mind-bendingly inconsequential chatter, no action to speak of and Charles spends an eye-rolling amount of time bellowing into the telephone at the corner of the set, presumably to ensure that everyone in the audience is clued up on what little plot developments there are. It’s all a colossal bore, despite the efforts of a game young cast to breathe life into it…. and what’s worse, it lasts nearly three hours including the interval.

Clearly Hodge couldn’t construct a plot like his contemporaries Priestley and Somerset Maugham, but neither could he at least create words for audiences to luxuriate in, à la Coward. The language in The Wind And The Rain is colourless and flaccid, rarely elevating to anything approaching wit, and the very brief suggestion of bisexuality (which the advertising blurb makes mention of, thereby making one wonder if the Trade Descriptions Act needs invoking) is suggested with a quick hand on the shoulder: this is hardly Design For Living.

Geoffrey Beevers’s stolid production isn’t helped by the fact that few of the younger members of cast, while enjoyably vital even when their script isn’t, seem to be able to capture the period style. A notable exception is Helen Reuben as Tritton’s London girlfriend, a perennially tipsy, glamorous flapperish type with a rich inner life, a tartly shrill giggle, an intriguingly ambiguous attitude, and a bit of a temper; she’s quite wonderful and lights up the stage whenever she’s on.

Carla Evans provides a warmly observed, richly detailed set and Edward Lewis’s evocative sound designs (everything from period music, offstage cacophony and apparently never-ending Edinburgh rain) is a valuable component in what appeal the show actually has. Writer Hodge’s “day job” was as an anaesthetist in a London hospital and it’s tempting to imagine that he put some of his patients out by reading sections of this play to them.

MODEST

by Ellen Brammar

Directed by Luke Skilbeck and Paul Smith

Kiln Theatre London – until 15 July 2023

https://kilntheatre.com/whats-on/modest/

Deliberately jarring in tone as it smashes together a plethora of performance styles and theatrical genres, Ellen Brammar’s new piece is a compelling demonstration that it’s possible to create a show that is simultaneously very angry while giving its audience a rollicking good time. With a contemporary music score by Rachel Barnes, Modest is a sort of queer pantomime infused with agitprop, peppered with anachronisms, using the story of painter Elizabeth Thompson, later Lady Butler, who in 1879 came within two votes of being the first woman elected into the Royal Academy, to examine male dominance and privilege, while employing drag king fabulousness, snarling attitude and rambunctious humour as its weapons of choice.

Not everybody will buy into the baroque extravagance of the script and of Luke Skilbeck and Paul Smith’s staging, which combines songs, lip synch routines and elements of stand-up comedy, but is surprisingly strong on historical detail and dramatic tension, though short on subtlety and formulaic discipline. If the tidal wave of rainbow-coloured joy and indignation doesn’t sweep you along, you may feel rather as though you’re at a party to which you haven’t been invited, such is the roaring engagement of the majority of the audience. To the show’s immense credit, the more outrageous, frequently laugh-out-loud moments don’t obscure the fury and fire in its soul, or the really superb writing for Elizabeth and her sometimes antagonistic sister Alice (Meynell, the poet and suffragist, reimagined here as a trans woman, played with considerable sensitivity and brilliance by Fizz Sinclair).

Emer Dineen, a vision of statuesque shimmer in a hot pink ballgown, is a commanding, thrilling voiced Thompson, often hilarious and commendably not afraid to point up some of the character’s more obnoxious traits (fiercely ambitious, with a rock solid confidence in her own abilities and no particular interest in elevating other women at a time in history when it was most sorely needed: she’s not always easy to root for; the show’s title is ironic). Sinclair’s Alice is a far more sympathetic figure, as is Libra Teejay’s non-binary, teenage fan and would-be artist Bessie, whose admiration for Elizabeth is disillusioned and all but extinguished by her idol’s selfishness.

The script, for all it’s sparkle and originality (Teejay also doubles as a magnificently unconventional Queen Victoria, popping Skittles like they’re ecstasy tablets and in command of a human-sized S&M lapdog…the men of the Royal Academy are Black Adder-ish grotesques portrayed with real relish), becomes frustrating as it throws up interesting ideas but then doesn’t do anything much with them. One such is the vast inequality between Elizabeth and Bessie’s incomes which means that the former can explore an artistic life whereas the latter is forced to languish in obscurity and servitude, which is something that certainly speaks to prospective artists in the present day. Another is the brief championing of Thompson by established painter Millais (Jacqui Bardelang, excellent) which comes out of nowhere and then stops with the life-changing vote which saw the female artist just miss out on entry to the RA membership. Thompson’s marriage is given just a cursory mention and the “I feel like burning some shit / I have matches” finale feels a bit like Emilia-lite. Some of the songs are authentic bangers but a couple of them unhelpfully stop the show in its tracks, especially if Dineen isn’t singing.

The cast are a versatile, talented bunch, doubling and tripling roles to exhilarating comic effect. Isabel Adomakoh Young is a joy as a particularly dim man from the RA, and a naive painter who follows Thompson, and watching Sinclair switch from Alice to a wonderfully awful old codger (“most women’s brains, are too small for intellectual or creative pursuits”) is astonishing. At the performance I saw, Madeleine McMahon was reading in for an indisposed LJ Parkinson as the senior, and probably most ghastly, of the Royal Academy gatekeepers and the sweet painter Alice falls for, and did a jaw-droppingly fine job of nailing every laugh in both characters and finding nuances of vulnerability in the latter: really terrific work.

Visually, the show could benefit from a little more flamboyance and style in terms of set design and lighting, and the storytelling could be clearer at times. Still, this is an inventive, thought-provoking and refreshingly unconventional piece of music theatre with organic fire in its belly and a lot on its mind. It also made me go away and look at Elizabeth Thompson’s paintings. In a particularly striking moment in the show, Dineen “paints” on a stretched out canvas of almost see-through film using various colours, and a pair of boxing gloves in lieu of a brush. It’s a punchy (literally), memorable image that effectively encapsulates what Thompson, and Modest, tries to do.

THE LIFE AND LOVES OF A BROADWAY BABY: An Evening with Melissa Errico at Crazy Coqs

Melissa Errico with special guest Isabelle Georges 

and James Pearson Band: James Pearson – Piano/MD Sam Burgess – Bass Chris Higgenbottom – Drums Graeme Blevins – Sax/Flute

Le Crazy Coqs at Brasserie Zedel, London – 10 July 2023

A quick glance at Broadway star Melissa Errico’s theatre resumé – Eliza in My Fair Lady, Cosette in Les Misérables, Maria in The Sound Of Music, Betty in White Christmas, Tracy in High Society – gives one an expectation that her cabaret is going to be something pleasant, melodic, easy to sit through, maybe a little bland. The Life And Loves Of A Broadway Baby turns out to be rather more than all that thought, due to the sheer, unexpected force of Ms Errico’s personality and her gloriously off kilter sense of humour.

Having only ever seen her playing (exquisitely) the role of Clara in John Doyle’s 2013 off-Broadway revival of Sondheim’s Passion, I knew she has a gorgeous voice and that she’s wholesomely beautiful. But I wasn’t prepared for her innate sense of camp, her self-deprecating humour and her earthy sensuality and physicality (the way she moves to music is something joyful to behold) when working through a set list heavy on Michel Legrand (she starred in his short-lived Amour musical on Broadway and is clearly a major Francophile), but also encompassing Porter, Gershwin and a fair bit of Sondheim, Her voice is honeyed and rich in the lower register before soaring effortlessly into soprano territory, and remaining miraculously sweet even when at full belt, it’s the sort of sound you don’t tend to hear much of in modern musicals.

With her tumble of brown curls (“well, most of it’s real” she quipped after being complimented), cherubic face and hourglass figure poured into a sparkling gown (“I came dressed as a saxophone”), she’s old school glamorous but delightfully off-the-wall funny as she talks about some of the Broadway flops she’s appeared in, or the showbiz history in her own family (some of her Italian American antecedents were Ziegfeld girls, and her great aunt was in the original cast of Showboat), or when dealing with an impromptu wardrobe malfunction. Her stories ramble a bit, but she’s so engaging and witty that it’s half of the pleasure of the evening. What she doesn’t talk about in the show is her burgeoning second career as a writer, but it helps explains why even at her most eccentric and apparently spontaneous she’s still razor-sharp, and why the spoken parts of the show are as enjoyable as the beautifully jazzed-up versions of such standards as Legrand’s “The Windmills Of Your Mind” or an unexpectedly glorious swinging mash up of My Fair Lady’s “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” with The Sound Of Music’s “My Favourite Things”.

James Pearson’s quartet provide fine back-up, and Errico’s surprise guest, Parisian theatre and cabaret star Isabelle Georges who comes bowling on like a French Carol Burnett before unleashing a sensational, rangy voice and fabulous comedy chops, is likely to have picked up a whole legion of British fans after this performance. In fact, the women – who clearly adore each other – work so well together it would be amazing to see them co-star in a full length show.

Ultimately, Errico is the real deal. An ageless singing actress (she talks about being a barmaid in London in the late 80s and being married for twenty five years but she’s so youthful and vital, it barely seems conceivable) with deceptively rock solid technique, an irrepressible joie de vivre but genuine depth and an innate, unforced likability. More than anything, I now wish I’d seen her Dot/Marie in Sondheim and Lapine’s Sunday In The Park With George (she does a lovely version of “Move On” here)….could somebody please revive that again for her?!

SHEWOLVES

by Sarah Middleton

directed by Hannah Stone

Southwark Playhouse Borough – until 8 July 2023

https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/shewolves/

Small really is beautiful sometimes. Several recent shows could have benefited from losing up to thirty minutes of running time without compromising their impact, so it’s refreshing to come across this fleet but mighty two hander with serious things on its mind while being possessed of a deft command of storytelling, irresistible humour and a commendable lightness of touch. Sarah Middleton’s Shewolves could actually be longer, and still be utterly captivating.

It’s a relatable, heartfelt but never cloying tale of friendship between two contrasting 14 year olds trying, initially in vastly different ways, to find their place in a world that is becoming ever more hostile, both in terms of the environment and the socio-economic infrastructure. Lou (Harriet Waters) idolises Greta Thunberg and looks set for a life of well-educated privilege, at least until she’s suspended from school for initiating a solo environmental protest. Meanwhile, irrepressible but vulnerable Priya (Gurjot Dhaliwal) uses social media as a means of validation as she tries to gain approval, or at least attention, from her absent dad and her newly affianced mother.

Middleton’s pithy, witty writing and the gutsy, caffeinated performances of these brilliant young actresses ensure that Shewolves never descends into cliché, even as it becomes possible to second guess where it’s heading and what’s going to come out of the mouths of its deeply lovable heroines. When Lou blithely refers to her new friend as “a lost cause”, it’s a funny, throwaway comment that has painful repercussions as Priya internalises the implicit dismissal and brings it up later in a moment of conflict. There’s a ring of authenticity to a scene where Lou (the kind of person whose early morning alarm is a posh voice repeating the words “Wake up! The world is still burning!”) delivers a lecture on imminent environmental disaster while Priya responds with an offer to take care of her monobrow.

Hannah Stone’s production has an exuberance and energy that befits its youthful characters but also gives full measure to their terrors and insecurities. The technical elements (Anna Reddyhoff – lighting, Eleanor Isherwood – sound and composition, Charlotte Henery – design) unobtrusively inform and support the text and performances while creating vivid visual and aural impressions. This is one of those allegedly simple productions that is actually way more complex than it looks.

Waters sometimes pushes a little too hard to convey Lou’s restless mixture of intense fervour and casual insensitivity, but she makes her inner conflicts vivid, moving and often very funny. Dhaliwal’s role is probably easier to negotiate – Priya goes from mouthy bravado to wearing her heart on her sleeve in an entirely credible journey – but she is an absolute knockout, expressing every beat and emotion with a devastating, open-faced honesty. They’re a fabulous team, impossible not to root for.

The title pertains to the name the young women give themselves when they go on the run from parental and scholastic authority, and their abandon and optimism is a joyous thing to witness. It’s also poignant because we guess that this verve and defiance is probably going to be short-lived, as adult responsibility inevitably overtake it.

Shewolves feels like the theatrical equivalent to really good Young Adult fiction, and that’s not a disrespect. It’s full of heart, fizz and truth. It’s sweet, spiky and smart. I loved it, even as I wished it went further and deeper. Still, very highly recommended.

SHUTTERS: A Lesbian Rock Opera

Music, lyrics and book by Rena Brannan

Directed by Tom Latter

Omnibus Theatre, London – until 24 June 2026

https://www.omnibus-clapham.org/shutters/

Anybody coming to a show billed as “a lesbian rock opera” is probably expecting something along the lines of RENT but with the Joanne/Maureen storyline given more prominence. The rather brilliant Korean-American-Irish composer-writer Rena Brannan has other ideas however, and, although this show probably defies the Trades Description Act (it’s not a rock opera, but more on that shortly), she has come up with something truly original, pretty bonkers, and impossible to pigeonhole.

Shutters: A Lesbian Rock Opera is simultaneously a story within a story (several stories actually), a meta-theatrical look at queer people through the years between the Hollywood Golden Age and the first two decades of the 21st century, a dyke odyssey, and a charming musical that’s surprisingly conventional at times. It still feels very much like a work in progress – it’s messy, occasionally misjudged and rough round the edges – but it has a wit and spirit entirely its own.

While it undoubtedly needs work (also a bigger budget, and possibly a strict dramaturg), it’s a compelling piece of musical theatre. Whatever happens to it next – and it totally deserves a further life beyond this brief run during Pride season – it is imperative that it doesn’t become too smooth, too conventional, as the jagged defiance and disarming rawness are a huge part of it’s appeal.

Brannan is a major talent, with a bold imagination and assured command of language. Shutters: A Lesbian Rock Opera isn’t just the name of the show, it’s also the title of a film property David O Selznick – yes, he who produced Gone With The Wind, which is often referenced here – is anachronistically kicking around. This means that a lot of what we’re watching is part of this project, which sometimes means an uncertainty of tone, at least as seen in Tom Latter’s production, but also a unique get-out-of-jail-free card for the creatives when the material doesn’t land. For instance, there’s a touchy-feely post-911 number that is actually a good song but feels a bit toe-curling yet it’s unclear if the issue is with the show we are watching or the movie Selznick is working on. The multiple time periods is a useful way to interrogate the contrast between queer lives back in the early part of the twentieth century as opposed to the recent past.

Although some of Brannan’s characters need more delineation, they express themselves in words erudite and honest. The score doesn’t really rock but that’s no disrespect to Faith Taylor’s virtuosic keyboard playing and backing vocals, and occasional knowing interjections. It just feels that it’s more about charm and eclecticism than thunder and bombast, and it needs more instrumentation. A larger band and orchestrations will surely reveal other colours. The vocal harmonies for the small company are already lovely, especially when heard acoustically.

The central characters are London-based musician Saving Liz (Morag Sims), Maggie the middle class, breadwinning career woman who adores her (Sarah Lawrie), and successful American singer-songwriter Billie Parker (Deanna Myers) who she truly loves. Liz and Billie have international meet-ups periodically while Maggie is the formers home base despite being a big noise in her own corporate field. If this sounds like classic RomCom territory with a sapphic twist, that’s not factoring in a rhyme-talking narrator (Bunny Cook) who feels like a third cousin to Cabaret’s Emcee without the make-up; and an audacious framing device involving Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy (Jules Melvin and Thom Tuck respectively), two of Hollywood’s most high profile closet jobs.

You really haven’t lived until you’ve heard Hepburn and Tracy growling through a Glam Rock-lite non-sexual love song about friendship. Melvin and Tuck (who also plays a spiteful Selznick) are utterly sublime and the brief snatch of the same song that the former mouths after news of Tracy’s lonely death packs a real emotional punch. By contrast, the terminal illness that sees off one of the principal characters in the more contemporary tranche of the story needs more foreshadowing and exploration.

Brannan is a cracking songwriter. As it stands right now, this is an impressive collection of tunes with incisive, occasionally outrageous lyrics, that could benefit from cutting loose a little. But when’s the last time you heard a sexually frustrated woman belt out “you love fucking chocolate more than you love fucking me” as a refrain in a musical ballad? There’s probably more relatable stuff in about ten minutes of Shutters than there is in the entire three hour sprawl of the current West End Aspects Of Love, even for heterosexuals.

The script needs focussing and reining in but it’s verbally elegant and often heartfelt: it fundamentally works and is occasionally better than that of many bigger shows who weren’t half this interesting at much later stages in their development. There’s a potentially delicious scene near the end, where a trio of women about to take questions at a forum on lesbian ethics, suddenly realise they’ve been sexually cross-pollinating, that gets cut short and currently feels like a missed opportunity. It’s fun but it could be funnier.

It could also benefit from being a bit sexier. At the end of the first act an exasperated Selznick resolves to make the film-in-progress into something raunchier. The act two opener, which sees Myers and Sims writhing all over each other in Chicago-esque outfits while Taylor delivers something gorgeous at their keyboard, fulfils that promise briefly but then the tone reverts to normal. Having set up the premise that there will be a significant difference between the two parts, it seems odd that this doesn’t really happen. All that said, it’s bracing to encounter a show that’s cynical where other musicals would probably go sentimental.

The cast are excellent. Sims doubles convincingly as a flaky but passionate Saving Liz (with a superb singing voice) and a smart, knowing old school Hollywood secretary-cum-assistant. Myers’s Billie is a winning combination of self assurance and vulnerability, negotiating the slightly unlikely fall from grace the script gives her with commendable conviction. Cook is an endearing bridge between the audience and the numerous story strands. Lawrie invests Maggie with an intriguing combination of uptight middle class awkwardness and self-involved lunacy. Crucially, she’s very funny but also entirely real.

“Lesbian is everything that loves itself. Don’t resist, can’t resist” goes one of Brannan’s repeated lyrics. While Shutters: A Lesbian Rock Opera isn’t quite irresistible yet, it has an ambition, fire and bizarre kookiness, but also a humanity, that make it impossible to write off. Director Latter needs to up the pace of many of the scenes, and the presentation of the music generally needs more oomph, but there is a lot here to admire. Enjoyable, thought-provoking and well worth catching.

THE MIKADO

Libretto by W S Gilbert

Music by Arthur Sullivan

Directed by Sasha Regan

Wilton’s Music Hall, London – until 1 July 2023, then touring

https://wiltons.org.uk/whatson/796-sasha-regan-s-all-male-the-mikado

Sasha Regan’s inventive all-male versions of Gilbert and Sullivan are wildly popular and this 1950s schoolboys take on perhaps the most beloved but, to modern eyes, problematic of the G&S canon of operettas successfully continues the tradition. The Mikado presents a challenge these days because, although Gilbert’s script was a witty “topsy-turvy” comment on English Victorian politics, it was created at a time when faux japonaiserie was all the rage and it was perfectly acceptable to give characters made-up ‘comedy’ Japanese names like Pish-Tush, Ko-Ko and Pooh-Bah, have them don yellowface, and set them loose in a town with an fabricated oriental name (Titipu).

Jonathan Miller’s long-standing English National Opera production sidestepped the cultural pitfalls by setting the whole thing in the whitewashed lobby of a plush 1920s English hotel, and now Regan presents it as a storytelling diversion for a bunch of 1950s schoolboys on a forest camping trip. Ryan Dawson Laight’s set consists mainly of a spinning tent, a campfire and trees climbing into the flies; to avoid offence, all the characters names have been anglicised but into something similar sounding so as not to mess with Gilbert’s intricate rhymes. So “wand’ring minstrel” Nanki-Poo becomes Bertie Hugh, the “three little maids from school” Yum-Yum, Pitti-Sing and Peep-Bo are now, respectively, Violet Plumb, Bluebell Tring and Hebe Flo, the vengeful gorgon Katisha is now Kitty Shaw, and so on. There’s still a Mikado (another word for Japanese Emperor) which doesn’t make much sense, but then again, it’s pretty much impossible to think of an English equivalent.

Actually, the Mikado is one of the highlights of the whole show. In a performance that would make the late Eric Morecambe proud, a wonderfully deadpan Lewis Kennedy presents him as a clumsy, Geordie-accented nutter with milk bottle-bottom glasses, wildly eccentric head gear and the alarming habit of addressing everyone through a loudhailer even when they are but centimetres away. As Kitty Shaw, the starched but bloodthirsty bicycle-riding sidekick who loves his errant son Bertie Hugh, Christopher Hewitt is almost as funny, envisioning her as a sort of nightmarish amalgam of Margaret Rutherford and The Wizard of Oz’s Miss Gulch. Despite the laughs, Hewitt gives the whole evening what little emotional anchor it has.

Another highlight is David McKechnie’s Lord High Executioner, Mr Cocoa, urgently hell bent on finding a victim so as to avoid decapitation himself. McKechnie plays him with a sweaty desperation and mounting exasperation that gets funnier and funnier, not least because the actor never loses sight of the absolute serious truth at the core of successful comedy.

Elsewhere it’s a bit of a muggers paradise, with each of the performers busily pitching his bit of comedy business directly at the audience. Some of it is hilarious but I personally reached my threshold of tolerance for gurning adults pretending to be children and strapping young men trying to out-fey each other as archly simpering schoolgirls, about halfway through the first half. Many will, I’m sure, feel differently, but in non binary 2023, this performance style feels a little passé. That said, nobody is likely to go and see a Victorian operetta performed in a beautiful old music hall expecting cutting edge innovation, and the audience went wild for it.

There are some gloriously inventive touches in Regan’s witty direction, and in Adam Haigh’s choreography, which does wonders in a limited space. Alistair Lindsay’s lighting is gorgeously evocative. MD Anto Buckley does a heroic, accomplished job of playing Sullivan’s intricate, endlessly tuneful score. The choral singing frequently thrills the blood. Just occasionally the higher notes in the solos, particularly female roles, sound a little pinched, but that could be a combination of vocal fatigue and the fact we are in the midst of allergies season, although Sam Kipling’s amusingly disingenuous Miss Plumb really nails Yum-Yum’s tricky, but liltingly lovely, “The Sun Whose Rays…” aria, a number which can be a challenge to even a conventional soprano.

Overall, this isn’t really my cup of tea, and I felt it got better and better as it went along. The second act improves considerably on the first, largely, for me, because it featured the title character and the unlikely but rather glorious romance between Kitty Shaw and Mr Cocoa. The whole thing brought a packed house to its feet, and the infectious joy rolling from the stage into the audience proves pretty disarming. Over what could be a challenging summer, this is set to make a lot of people very happy, and it’s hard not to come away with a bit of a rosy glow.

42ND STREET

Music by Harry Warren

Lyrics by Al Dubin

Book by Michael Stewart and Mark Bramble

Based on the novel by Bradford Ropes

Original direction and dances by Gower Champion

Directed by Jonathan Church

Sadlers Wells Theatre, London – until 2 July 2023, then touring

https://www.sadlerswells.com/whats-on/42nd-street/

42nd Street is the quintessential backstage musical, the motherload of showbiz fairytales. Based on a 1930s novel then movie about the eternally hopeful chorine who achieves instant stardom against all odds (“you’re going out there a nobody, but you’ve got to come back a star” bellows the bombastic director to neophyte Peggy Sawyer before pushing her into the spotlight), it was a major Broadway and West End success in the 1980s, and enjoyed a lavish revival at Drury Lane just before the venue closed for an extensive pre-pandemic refurbishment.

Now it’s back, in a brand new Curve Leicester production touching down at Sadlers Wells before embarking on a (substantially recast) national tour. The plot is fairly thin, but when the central performances and characterisations are as strong as they are in Jonathan Church’s new staging, which also makes a valid attempt at contextualising the show in the grim depression era rather than just presenting it as a glitzy stagey fable, Michael Stewart and Mark Bramble’s book feels like more than just a framework on which to peg a selection of Harry Warren and Al Dublin’s best known numbers.

And what beloved numbers they are: the title song, ‘We’re In The Money’, ‘Dames’, ‘Lullaby of Broadway’ and more all come up fresh as paint in Larry Blank’s suitably brassy orchestrations and sung by a uniformly strong company of voices. This production may not be as huge in scale as earlier iterations but neither does it look or feel cheap, or lacking the requisite flamboyance this show needs to really pop.

More than in any other version I’ve seen, there’s a sense that there’s a lot at stake, of artists attempting to create theatrical magic against the background of desperate financial privations, and that if the gamble of putting on this sumptuous new spectacle doesn’t pay off, then many of these people really will be on the breadline. To this end, the extended overture is punctuated by vintage film footage of a wan, destabilised 1930s America, interspersed with brief onstage glimpses, dimly lit, of auditions and gruelling dance classes. Far from sapping the fun out of this most entrancing of musicals, this extra intensity and context has the effect of throwing all the joyful stuff (of which there is plenty) into sharper, more concentrated relief.

If Adam Garcia seems a little young and down-to-earth to fully convince as hard boiled director Julian Marsh, he has an easy charm, and is pure magic in the brief moments when he gets to dance. His characterisation is further helped by the elimination of the bit of comedy business where Julian passionately kisses Peggy to elicit a specific romantic response in the script they’re working on. The recent Paris revival kept it in and, while it works, it looks borderline creepy through 2023 eyes.

Ruthie Henshall delivers far and away the most well rounded, hilarious yet oddly touching reading of diva-ish leading lady Dorothy Brock that I’ve ever seen. Magnificently venomous but with an undertow of unexpected vulnerability, she is part monster, part kitten, and entirely believable. Henshall is so magnetic that you sort-of love her even when she’s behaving appallingly, and, crucially, ignites the stage with authentic stardom when Dorothy is “performing”….difficult as this woman is, she is clearly the Real Deal. If it takes a star to play a star, then Henshall is it.

The Real Deal is a phrase that also applies to Nicole-Lily Baisden’s enchanting Peggy Sawyer. A glorious triple threat with enough energy and charisma to light up the Empire State Building, Baisden captures precisely Sawyer’s wide-eyed enthusiasm and sheer likability, but also gives her a steely edge of ambition. She’s utterly convincing too when she thinks she’s blown her showbiz dreams, and breaks your heart with her open-faced sadness. She’s fabulous.

Further down the cast list is some serious luxury casting. As Maggie Jones and Bert Barry, creators and co-stars of the musical-within-a-musical, Josefina Gabrielle and Les Dennis are a winning double act. Dennis’s Bert is a delightful loose cannon, kept (just about) on the straight and narrow by Gabrielle’s glamazon Maggie, a woman acutely aware of possible problems with her writing partner but also constantly mindful that they desperately need this gig. Gabrielle’s stage presence, ability to point a comic line, subtle playing of subtext, and sardonic way with a lyric is an object lesson in musical comedy performance, like watching an authentic Broadway diva in action, and she’s missed whenever she’s not on stage.

Sam Lips is utter perfection as the juvenile male lead, and Michael Praed lends Pat Denning, the man Dorothy loves and probably the only person capable of truly humanising her, a heart catching warmth and depth. Anthony Ofoegbu is very funny as the clueless sugar daddy that is funding Brock’s stage return while also standing in the way of her true happiness.

The tightly drilled ensemble deliver Bill Deamer’s elegant, tap-happy choreography with flair, commitment and apparently inexhaustible energy. Some of the bigger numbers threaten to raise the rafters of the theatre, and the cumulative effect is of a couple of dozen people defying you to wipe the smile off your face.

Robert Jones’s sets and costumes are attractive, employing a predominantly deep blue and gold colour pallet, periodically shot through with reds, greens and sparkle, all augmented by liberal use of projections, and gorgeously lit by Ben Cracknell. It may be a slightly more visually restrained 42nd Street than we’re used to, but it’s evocative (the titular ballet looks like a Vincente Minnelli movie musical burst into life) and opulent.

This is an intelligent but still exhilarating new slant on a much loved property. It feels fresh and vital, but has enough of the good old stuff to keep veteran theatregoers happy. Really great entertainment that sends you out into the night misty-eyed and satisfied. I defy anybody not to enjoy it.

ASPECTS OF LOVE

Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber

Lyrics by Don Black and Charles Hart

Based on the novel by David Garnett

Lyric Theatre, London – until 11 November 2023

https://www.aspectsoflove.com

With controversy surrounding a youngster being potentially groomed by a much older man being all over the media at the moment, the timing could hardly be worse for this revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1989 musical (really a chamber opera given that almost everything is sung). Seeing Aspects Of Love in 2023 provokes the inescapable feeling that you’re watching one of the Lord’s loveliest scores unfortunately tethered to a story that seems to get more problematic with every passing year.

Based on David Garnett’s 1955 novella about bedhopping Bohemians disporting erotically and complicatedly all over Europe in the 1940s, it often felt like the poor relation in the early Lloyd Webber canon, coming as it did in the wake of Phantom, although the original London run clocked up a run of three years. Bad Cinderella and Stephen Ward would surely have been more than happy with that, and Aspects has enjoyed numerous tours, international productions and revivals since the original. It was last seen in London in 2019 at Southwark Playhouse in Jonathan O’Boyle’s exquisite bijou version from Manchester’s Hope Mill which intriguingly for a show that is sometimes tainted with accusations of misogyny put the women front and centre, with an astonishing lead performance from Kelly Price as histrionic but irresistible French actress Rose Vibert.

Jonathan Kent’s new production is less a revival than a full on revisal, switching the nationality of the central character Alex from English to American (presumably to accommodate new leading man Jamie Bogyo), changing a sizeable percentage of the lyrics, cutting, adding and repositioning scenes, altering the ages of a couple of principal characters, and reallocating Alex’s big number ‘Love Changes Everything’ to his bon viveur Uncle George.

That last alteration is one of the most successful and not just because it gives Michael Ball fans another chance to hear their idol perform his signature song (Ball was the first Alex in Trevor Nunn’s West End and Broadway premieres), which he does magnificently, albeit in a lower key. Originally a youthful declaration of the vicissitudes of love that sat slightly randomly in the score as a whole, here it is more contemplative and regretful coming from an older character. Ball still owns it though. Actually he lights up the stage whenever he is on, capturing all of George’s bonhomie, self-absorption and complicatedly conflicted emotions as the story twists and turns. It’s a charming, commanding performance, vocally winning and dramatically satisfying, that reaffirms Ball’s status as this country’s foremost musical theatre leading man.

Many of Don Black and Charles Hart’s original lyrics, always one of the weaker aspects of Aspects, have been tinkered with, mostly to positive effect, although the mind boggles that they still didn’t see fit to excise such wince-inducing horrors as “I think I know the reason you’re so keen for this to end / I saw what you were doing with your new Italian friend” or “Now tell me, do you still like omelettes?” The banality of the words contrast so jarringly with the full blown melodic lushness of Lloyd Webber’s tunes (Tom Kelly’s new orchestrations sound gorgeous as played by Cat Beveridge’s fine thirteen piece band) that I can’t help but wonder if this might be one of those rare shows best enjoyed by non-English speakers who can just experience the rapture of the music without having a clue what’s coming out of anybody’s mouth, a bit like watching an unfamiliar opera in it’s original language, without surtitles.

That said, I’m not sure the action in Kent’s pretty but ponderous staging would help anybody not listening to the words, to understand what was going on. In this rethinking, Alex is eighteen when he first meets and falls for older actress Rose (Laura Pitt-Pulford) and so is Jenny (Anna Unwin), George and Rose’s daughter (I told you it was complicated), when she in turn becomes besotted with her much older cousin. Despite the obvious talent of most of the leading players, there is zero sexual chemistry. During the idyllic first section where youthful Alex and Rose romp through the Pyrenees in the first flush of lust, you should get the overwhelming feeling that they can’t wait to rip each others clothes off, but instead this pair wander about like a couple of kids on a geography field trip. Far from adoring each other, most of the principal characters seem to barely even like each other, a problem exacerbated by some mind-bogglingly awkward blocking and misconceived musical staging.

In the original, Alex and Jenny were seventeen and fifteen respectively, so at least this new version removes paedophilia from the roll call of potentially troubling themes (incest and grooming being perhaps the two biggest no-no’s) that run through a story that seeks to be head-turningly romantic but in the wrong hands can come across as self-indulgent and not a little creepy. On paper, one would have expected a director with Jonathan Kent’s track record to be absolutely the right hands to steer this delicate but tricky ship.

Unfortunately though, in practise, he fails to make the disparate strands of melodrama, comedy and full blown romanticism coalesce, rendering an already elusive story pretty hard to follow. It all feels excessively restrained, precious and lacking in heat. Without a sense of palpable passion and the fire in their hearts and veins, the characters can come across as unlikeable, apart from Michael Ball’s George and Anna Unwin’s heartfelt, winsome Jenny.

Laura Pitt-Pulford is among this country’s finest musical theatre leading ladies, a consummate artist with heart, presence and formidable technique. Unfortunately though, her Rose feels too polite, too sensible, as though she has been directed to stay constantly at one remove from the other people on stage and from us. Pitt-Pulford sings the role terrifically but seldom finds the warmth, the earth, and the sexual magnetism to really make sense of this complex woman. I think it’s a directorial issue: for instance, during the impassioned tarantella ‘Hand Me The Wine And The Dice’ at George’s funeral, Trevor Nunn’s original Rose (the late, great Ann Crumb) danced wildly while sobbing pitifully having just scattered her husband’s ashes amongst his vineyards, it was cruel, powerful and rousing. Kent however has his Rose sit passively on a random cart on one side of the stage with her back to the audience as though waiting for the post-funeral vol au vents to be passed around. His star deserves better.

It also doesn’t help Pitt-Pulford that her leading man is so lacking in charisma that it makes nonsense of whole swathes of the story. It may be that Bogyo’s work reads brilliantly up close or in the audition and rehearsal room, but it fails to travel across the footlights; that was an issue in Moulin Rouge and it feels like an even bigger problem here where his singing is passable, but his acting is less than that. Opera star Danielle De Niese works hard and looks fabulous as George’s other great love, the Italian sculptress Giuletta, but her characterisation feels entirely too uncomplicated to convey a woman who was widowed young and suffers from waves of debilitating depression, plus the score doesn’t seem particularly well suited to her voice. There are richly enjoyable cameos from Michael Matus and Rosemary Ashe as a couple of innocent bystanders caught up in all the drama.

The staging aims for a cinematic feel but is hampered by the limited size of the Lyric’s stage (also not helped by having the musicians on a raised level at the back of the playing area, and coyly but pointlessly revealed during two orchestral sections, as though to reassure the audience that the music is in fact being played live). The use of panels with sometimes mystifying projections traversing the space during scene changes gets pretty tiresome, and a series of filmic close-ups and reveals later in act two, redolent of Michael Blakemore’s masterly original production of City of Angels or currently Sam Mendes’s vision for The Motive and the Cue over at the National, comes out of nowhere.

The uncertainty of tone and lack of palpable passion in the staging fatally blunts the emotional impact of the swooning swells and unexpected dissonances in Lloyd Webber’s score. Furthermore, this odd production makes a couple of the more eccentric scenes – a random act one visit to a fairground, and a circus sequence in the second half – feel even more surplus to requirements than in earlier versions. On the up side, John Macfarlane’s attractive, painterly scenery, ravishingly lit by Jon Clark, mean that even when boredom and/or bewilderment sets in, the whole thing is lovely to look at. It’s also often very beautiful to hear, but it’s a disappointingly pedestrian, inconsistent take on a sophisticated, conflicted musical.

ROSE

by Martin Sherman

directed by Scott Le Crass

Ambassadors Theatre, London – until 18 June 2023

https://www.atgtickets.com/shows/rose/ambassadors-theatre/

So, apparently you can improve upon perfection. As Rose Rose might say, “who knew?!” When rising star director Scott Le Crass’s note-perfect production of Martin Sherman’s solo play that distils an entire generation of Jewish experience, from pogroms in a Ukrainian shtetl through the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto to the post-WW2 diaspora and a life of pragmatic plenty in America, transferred to London’s Park Theatre last year it was a total knockout. Who could imagine that a woman alone on a bench talking solidly for more than two hours could be so utterly spellbinding? Well, when that woman is Dame Maureen Lipman delivering career best work in a performance this extraordinary, it is required viewing.

She, and it, are back for a limited West End season that is on no account to be missed by anybody who couldn’t get tickets for the Park or Manchester runs (after an initial outing on screen during the pandemic, this Rose first bloomed on stage up at the Hope Mill in 2022). Anybody who went before and goes back may be struck by how much deeper and darker the production and performance now are. There’s more telling detail in the emotional highs and lows, more contrast between the dark and the light. Lipman’s Rose feels tougher somehow, even more of a pragmatic survivor. The cruelty she purports to have feels nearer to the surface, and it’s fascinating. If she’s now less ingratiating – you really feel you are encountering a woman who has looked into the yawning chasm of hell – she’s probably even more magnetic than she was before.

The late Olympia Dukakis premiered Rose at the National in 1999 before taking it to Broadway, and she was technically terrific but, not being Jewish, perhaps inevitably lacked the authenticity and intensity Lipman brings to the work. Sherman’s extended monologue is harrowing but rich, encompassing loss, hope, survival, the emotional and spiritual legacy handed down through generations, sexuality, mortality, making do….Lipman delves so deeply into the text, into this woman’s experience both personal and global, that it barely feels like acting at all.

When Rose Rose (her name is explained in the course of the play) first shuffles on in her comfy but elegant shabby-chic clothing with her immaculately coiffed hair, she seems pretty ordinary, like many other Miami Beach retirees, garrulous, warm, funny, maybe a little cranky. But Sherman’s script and Lipman’s charismatic performance go on to demonstrate that for the generation of Jews who escaped the anti-Semitic atrocities in twentieth century Europe, their lives were anything but “ordinary”, that their latter day security and contentment was hard won, their stories etched in blood, guilt and tragedy, and their survival bathed in humour ranging from ironic to gallows.

Maureen Lipman is astounding: her command of an audience, her ability to make the text sound as though she’s improvising on the spot, her lightning quick changes from cosy to cruel, chatty to profound, her timing, her authenticity, her technical precision… it all adds up to one of the greatest performances I’ve witnessed in a lifetime of theatregoing. There’s a dancer-like grace to the way her wide expressive hands whirr in front of her long, lovely face as she emphasises a point, and how her body sways as she recalls the motion of the boat that took her, all too briefly, to Palestine following the traumas of WW2 in Europe. Lipman’s face is unforgettable, mesmerising, equal parts granite and naked humanity as she vividly registers everything from memories of erotic awakening to unspeakable horror at the news of a child’s death, and blank shock at an unexpected reunion. Her accent is interesting, starting as American but becoming increasingly Mittel European as she delves back into her memories, some comforting, some hilarious, some rueful, many of them traumatic. It happens almost imperceptibly, but the detail takes the breath away.

Le Crass rightly places Lipman centre stage and matches her brilliance with a staging that is as stylish as it is unobtrusive. The pacing is exquisite and feels entirely organic, galvanising as Rose hits her stride in an especially impassioned flight of recall, sometimes slow and gentle as the text turns elegiac. Ultimately, everything Rose does, from mimicking Yiddish star Molly Picon in vintage movies to washing down her daily pills with ice cream (“I know, I know, I’m eating ice cream to take a pill for cholesterol. I’ll tell you something – who cares?”) to listening to her son berate her for sitting shiva for a child she never knew, becomes absolutely transfixing.

Jane Lalljee’s ever-changing lighting states complement the majesty of Sherman’s writing and Lipman’s acting without detracting from them, as does Julian Starr’s haunting sound score. Perhaps nothing is as powerful though as the silence in the room as the audience hangs on Rose’s every word.

This is a masterclass: Lipman is deeply moving; if she’s not as obviously funny this time around, that feels like a deliberate choice, and the opposing gain is more truth, an even more nuanced and unflinching appreciation for what this tricky, damaged, powerful woman has been through. Sherman takes us, and her, on a journey through twentieth century history that is at once a warning, a lesson and, almost miraculously, riveting entertainment. Lipman’s Rose is at once a mass of contradictions and a crucible of sheer humanity, and breathing the same air as her is an essential experience.