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42ND STREET ★★★★★ Theatre Royal Drury Lane, until September 6. Tickets: 0207 400 1257
IT IS one of the most famous lines in musicals: “You’re going out a youngster. But you’ve got to come back a star!” And this is where you heard it first. 42nd Street is the 1930s equivalent of the blockbuster movie. It is designed to blow you away.
Its key ingredients may seem like clichés but this is the musical that invented them: the Busby Berkeley dance routines performed by scores of girls in feathers, sequins and not much else; the backstage backstabbing; the desperation of the chorus girls and boys in the Great Depression when to be out of a job meant not just hardship but destitution; the wealthy patron who’ll invest in a show only if his girlfriend wins a role; the broke Broadway producer’s last roll of the dice.
In 1933 when Warner Brothers made the movie with Ruby Keeler, Ginger Rogers and Dick Powell, all these elements were freshly minted. But by the time the movie-inspired musical reached Broadway in 1980, they offered nostalgia with a capital N.
So three cheers for director Mark Bramble and his fellow stage adapter Michael Stewart for sticking to authentic production values. And there isn’t a weak link among the performers.
Eighties singing star Sheena Easton leads the charge as the Margo Channing-meets-Cruella De Vil diva Dorothy Brock and there is sterling work from Emmerdale’s Tom Lister as hard-nosed producer Julian Marsh, Clare Halse as the star-in-waiting Peggy Sawyer and the fleet-footed Graeme Henderson as Andy Lee.
From the moment the curtain rises to the thunderous clatter of 50 or so pairs of feet tapping up a storm on the stage, the cast put their hearts and soles into the show. The dialogue zings and the songs (by Harry Warren and Al Dubin) may be politically incorrect but they are just so damned singable: Keep Young And Beautiful, With Plenty Of Money And You and Lullaby Of Broadway put a smile on your face that won’t fade.
The show offers more spectacle than Cecil B DeMille and so much glitz you’ll need to wear sunglasses. This is old-fashioned entertainment on an epic scale and I wallowed in every spangled moment of it.
CONSENT ★★★ National Theatre, until May 17. Tickets: 0207 452 3000
THE characters in Nina Raine’s play remind me of this joke: Why don’t sharks attack lawyers? Professional courtesy.
Of the two smug married couples and two singletons on stage, three practise law in some form. Rape victim Gayle (Heather Craney) barges into a house party to find that the barrister for the defence and the barrister for the prosecution are old pals and it is too much for her damaged mind to bear. Her fate sticks a crowbar into the relationships of the two intelligent, cool and self-satisfied couples and prises them apart. Raine’s play is rather too aware of its structural and linguistic symmetry and the gender divisions are calibrated with textbook precision. When new mother Kitty (Anna Maxwell Martin) accuses her husband Edward (Ben Chaplin) of lacking empathy, he defends himself with rigorous intellectual argument. Yet when she indulges in a revenge affair with their friend Tim (Pip Carter), she is as capable of lying as her husband. When their actress friend Zara (Daisy Haggard) appears in a Greek play, it conveniently emphasises the subjects of vengeance, justice and the battle of the sexes. The clean, brilliant language emulates legal argument but there is a great deal of humour to help the medicine go down. Despite being overstuffed with ideas, it is a smart and viciously entertaining evening.