Give this musical more sex and less sax!
WITH his teaspoon- scoop dimples and broad brow and a voice that can stroke the softness of a muffled French horn, Michael Ball may not be the likeliest figure to play pre-talkies Hollywood tough Mack Sennett. Yet Mr Ball has stage presence and he just about sees this patchy Jerry Herman musical through its problematic first half.
The show was written in 1974. It is worth affirming that — if only because Michael Stewart’s clunking book keeps telling us which year we are in. ‘Brooklyn in 1911’ is our first guidebook-style signpost.
Then ‘it’s 1921!’, and another ‘it’s 1921’ (they should have said ‘it’s still 1921’) before we move to the late Twenties and a rewardingly weepy denouement in 1930.
Mack is a director of two-reel slapstick comedies, a man for custard-pie fights and, later, Keystone Kops. He discovers zesty young Mabel when she is a hot-dog waitress in new York. Soon she follows Mack to Hollywood and is starring in his comedies.
Rebecca LaChance, as sarsaparilla-sipping Mabel, is, well, a hit-and-miss. Her own charisma is initially less evident than that of the film natural she is playing.
Longbefore the interval there is a sense the show could do with more tunes, less talk and a great deal more sex appeal, although the pre-interval number Hundreds of girls is good fun, with beach balls and swimming costumes and clever use of movie footage.
Workmanlike support comes f rom Jack Edwards as Fatty Arbuckle, Anna- Jane Casey as actress Lottie and various young chaps in tank tops, but it is hard to sell this as a first- division musical. It does have a lovely song, I Won’tt Send Roses, but we have to wait too long for it.
The staging ng includes some computer-generated nerated effects for a train journey, ney, old- style film footage and an unfussy set from Robert Jones, but the nonchalance of the story’s central love affair robs it of the intensity that fires the best musicals.
Things perk up further in the second half, thank goodness, Stephen Mear’s choreography hitting the spot when Mabel returns to Mack after a flirtation with rival director and heroin user William Desmond Taylor (Mark Inscoe).
Later, Mabel is about to board a liner for Europe when Mack courts her on the quayside. In that moment her fate may be sealed.
In recent years, Chichester Festival Theatre, under Jonathan Church, has become a hotspot for tap dancing, and dance number Tap Your Troubles Away duly obliges, the red lighting adding a clever flavour of menace. The Herman lyrics are often witty. Mack says of rival director D.W. griffith: ‘Let Mr griffith deal in humanity’s woes, I’d rather film a guy with a fly on his nose.’
Does Mr Ball’s voice struggle to cut through the band sometimes? Maybe. And the saxophone is far too loud over Mabel’s ballad Time Heals Everything.
But eventually our lead lady takes her LaChance — and a never unlikable show will succeed in wringing a tear or two from the most sceptical ducts.