A capital show that’s right on the money
TWO plays about financiers opened in London this week. Dry Powder at the Hampstead is pretty capital, but I’m afraid the Park’s musical about the Rothschilds is creakily nostalgic and unlikely to shift the markets.
At the Hampstead you need your wits about you. American playwright Sarah Burgess plunges us straight into one of those small, ruthless equity fund management firms where they bandy around terms such as ‘ top quartile’, ‘ zero- based budgeting’, ‘ LPs’ (limited partners) and, yes, ‘dry powder’ — the money a fund has in its tank.
At the New York offices of KMM Capital Management they reckon themselves pretty insuperable, executives Seth and Jenny vying to impress their boss Rick with investment proposals. Who can screw the fatter return out of which buy-out?
Trouble arrives when the media start protesting about mass layoffs at a supermarket chain KMM recently bought. Rick is initially nonchalant about adverse newspaper headlines, but he starts to care when those headlines unsettle his own investors.
This 100- minute midtownManhattan tingler zips along and is slickly staged by Anna Ledwich. Hayley Atwell, Tom Riley and a maybe too- youthful Aidan McArdle work fine as the KMM trio. The only other character we meet is Jeff (Joseph Balderrama), head of a luggage firm KMM hopes to acquire (and gut).
Along the way there are various zingers about Manhattan corporate culture — ‘vacations are for expendable people’ and ‘allow less intelligent people to hate you’.
Is it useful for financiers to have a conscience or does that, in the long run, just weaken capitalism? They use philanthropy cynically as a way to buy political approval and a distinction appears to be made between manufacturers, who employ people, and financiers, who use them. Here is capitalism in its swanky- suited, powermeeting raw; merciless, mathematical, mercantile.
Dry Powder is refreshing and provocative and perfect for the Hampstead’s moneyed clientele.
■ THINgS move more stickily at the Park Theatre. Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, whose Fiddler On The Roof was such a hit, also came up with a 1970 musical, The Rothschilds. This follows the rise of that celebrated banking family from Frankfurt’s 18th- century Jewish ghetto. The show has been tweaked and is now called Rothschild & Sons.
Frivolously, I imagined a songlist with ballads in praise of interest rates or Napoleonic war bonds — a sort of ‘Overdraft, The Musical’.
Instead, we are told what the Rothschilds did for Jewish people and how they used their financial clout to force untrustworthy Prince Metternich and his Austrian Empire to tear down the ghetto walls. The Park’s smallish stage becomes cluttered as pater familias Mayer Rothschild (Robert Cuccioli), his wife gutele (glory Crampton) and their five sons fill the stage.
gary Trainor’s Nathan is the best of the boys. There is some jolly stuff earlier when Mayer keeps praying for another son and an increasingly bedraggled and bow-legged Mrs R keeps poppin’ ’em out.
More humour would help. At present the story is rather too long on virtue and historical exposition. Tony Timberlake’s caricatured Austrian aristocrats bring a few shafts of welcome satire, but I couldn’t quite work out why he and the other Central Europeans had guttural accents, while the Rothschilds all spoke with American twangs.
Mr Cuccioli has an ivory smile despite the show’s surfeit of sugar. This reaches its height in the finale when Mayer Rothschild’s ghost thrusts open some central doors and, with a Ronald Reaganish tweak of his head, tells his offspring: ‘Boys, never forget who you are!’