REVIVALS, REWORKINGS AND RESUSCITATIONS
London — mostly — underwhelms with musical retreads, writes Jamie Portman.
LONDON Checking out London’s hallowed West End Theatre scene these days is rather like being dumped in a recycling bin — especially when it comes to musicals.
You search in vain for the new and original. Instead, you get revivals, reworkings and resuscitations. The fact that many are superbly mounted doesn’t always conceal the aroma of the museum — even the mausoleum.
To be sure, there is some genuine gold among recent arrivals — most notably the homegrown Half A Sixpence and An American In Paris — but even they are reflective of producers wary of risking their money on fresh material.
The so-called jukebox musical remains a pernicious presence, with look-alike, sound-alike impersonators seeking to evoke the glory days of Motown, Carole King and Michael Jackson. In the latter connection, Thriller Live — a slick but creepy disinterment of Mikey and The Jackson 5 — is now in its ninth make-believe year at the Lyric Theatre.
Motion pictures have also become lucrative raiding grounds. Nobody can begrudge the entertainment value of the superb stage version of 42nd Street, a 1933 Warner Brothers classic, now in its second moneymaking round at the historic Drury Lane Theatre with a cast headed by Sheena Easton. But it’s the people at Disney, the entertainment world’s most devoted recyclers of cartoon originals, who increasingly dominate the scene these days, with The Lion King continuing to hold court at the Lyceum Theatre, and Aladdin at the Prince Edward.
Meanwhile, Andrew Lloyd Webber has given his sagging career a boost with School of Rock, a lively reworking of another iconic movie from the past. There’s also Calendar Girls, which began as a movie comedy about a group of Yorkshire women who pose nude for a charitable endeavour. It was then transformed into a hit stage play, and has now been reborn again as a musical called The Girls, a show that seems destined for a long run at the Phoenix Theatre.
With the exception of shows like Dreamgirls, a seminal musical that has finally arrived in London 36 years after its historic Broadway launching, The Book Of Mormon and Cyndi Lauper’s lively Kinky Boots, there’s a marked tendency to rework existing source material, presumably on the grounds that familiarity breeds contentment.
That’s not always bad: My Fair Lady, wouldn’t have happened without Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, but it was a brilliant creative achievement in its own right. There’s a difference between finding new inspiration in existing source material and simply being content to deliver a slick clone-like variation.
True creativity is strikingly evident in the visually stunning An American In Paris, now gracing the stage of the Dominion Theatre, a venue that was previously home for more than a decade to a mind-numbing Queen musical. Now we’re getting a heady bouquet of George Gershwin classics in a show that pays homage to the 1951 Vincente Minnelli musical of the same name while also resolutely avoiding a slavish imitation. The slender plot line of the original remains — American GI stays in Paris after the war to practise his craft as an artist, falls in love, suffers setbacks — but it is now clothed in the stunning creative vision of director-choreographer Christopher Wheeldon and designer Bob Crowley. There are moments when you seem to be immersed in a Monet or Renoir painting. No more beautiful production has been seen in London for decades. And the evergreen Gershwin music is wonderful.
Meanwhile, the Noel Coward Theatre is housing a revised version of Half A Sixpence, the exuberant 1965 David Heneker musical based on the H.G. Wells novel Kipps. The original production was a vehicle for Tommy Steele, who brought his toothy charm to the role of Arthur Kipps, the humble draper’s assistant who inherits a fortune only to learn that money can’t buy happiness. Back then, Steele was involved in 12 of the 15 songs. Now, thanks to a new book by Julian Fellowes of Downton Abbey fame, the material shows more balance when it comes to distribution of its musical gems.
A few new songs by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe have been added, but they pale beside the original Heneker score, one of the best ever created for a British musical. Mop-headed newcomer Charlie Stemp makes a spirited debut as Arthur Kipps and is the driving force behind Flash, Bang, Wallop, the explosive ensemble number that brings an immensely likable musical to a conclusion that leaves audiences refusing to leave their seats and roaring for more.
Meanwhile, of course, there’s the incomprehensible phenomenon of Les Miserables, still trudging along a few blocks away. It can legitimately be argued that it’s a soppy, overwrought trivialization of a great novel, redeemed only by excellent casting and the brilliant staging of Trevor Nunn and John Caird. Yet, can the 70 million people who have now seen it around the world really been that wrong?
Andrew Lloyd Webber has given his sagging career a boost with School of Rock.