Bitter-suite evocation of hotel life
WITH a three-night residency at the King’s Theatre as part of the Festival, expectations were always going to be high for this multimedia evocation of Room 29, the concept album by ex-Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker and Canadian pianist and composer Chilly Gonzales, based around hollywood’s infamous Chateau Marmont hotel.
Yet this hybrid mix of pop gig, theatre and An Audience With... trawls through the highs and lows (mostly lows) of the hotel and is very much a hit and miss affair.
The audience are given a key at the door of the auditorium that turns out to be for the purposes of some jangling percussive
Room 29 Tales from infamous Chateau ★★★✩✩
accompaniment later, then we’re invited to join the pair in Room 29, where Cocker stayed and hit upon the idea of exploring its past, and the stories it could tell.
From here on in the show is a baggy, uneven stitching-together of quips, songs and film clips, (some from the Golden Age of hollywood; some mockumentary video diaries of Cocker’s visitcum-music videos) that only intermittently captures the electric frisson of either artist’s live gigs.
With Gonzales seated at the piano in the room, and Jarvis arriving lugging his baggage for a visit, opening number Tearjerker gets proceedings off to a good start, capturing the weary existential angst of a traveller spending a dark night of the soul in the room, while his girlfriend waits at the airport.
But the onstage banter between the duo is only occasionally funny, Cocker’s droll, wry pop miserabilist musings sitting somewhat uncomfortably alongside Gonzales’s attempts to channel his inner Victor Borge, and the show benefits from a much-needed injection of musical muscle when a string quartet are ordered from room service to join them on stage.
it also strays off message, its attention turning from Room 29, to generalisations about hotel artefacts and hotel living. These gimmicky interludes are only reined in when potted celebrity biogs remind us Jean harlow’s husband found reality intruding on fantasy here on his honeymoon night (chronicled by Cocker on Bombshell); and howard hughes used the penthouse as a crow’s nest casting couch.
There are moments to savour here: Cocker mingling with the audience; Belle Boy – ‘life could be a bed of roses /if it wasn’t filled with so many p **** s’; and showstopper A Trick Of The Light, which shows fame and fortune isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Unfortunately, for too much of the time, neither really is Room 29.
King’s Theatre tonight